CHAPTER V

FROM PEARL HARBOR TO VICTORY IN EUROPE:
1. THE OFFENSIVE STRATEGY

(1)

Introductory: The Two Summits

In Mr. Churchill's famous phrase the year 1942 saw 'the end of the
beginning'.1 The time of preparation
was nearly over, and the
country
could begin to plan how to deploy the Forces it had gathered and
equipped in the preceding three years. That a moment like this would
come some time in 1942 had always been foreseen, though the precise
date may for a long time have remained indefinite. The strategic and
industrial hypothesis underlying the successive Service programmes of
1939, 1940 and 1941 implied a turning point in the conduct of the war
soon after the end of 1941. The armed forces could be then be expected
to reach their planned strength and to receive the final instalment of
their 'capital equipment'. The terminal point of the Army plans could
not, of course, be reached in December 1941 as required by the strict
timetable of the 1940 requirements for Z+27;2
but, in spite of all
the postponements, the War Office and the Ministry of Supply continued
to act on the assumption that the equipment of the field forces would
be more or less completed by the end of the year. Similarly, the first
comprehensive wartime programme of aircraft construction (the
'Harrogate' programme of September 1939),3 and
the programmes of
1940
and 1941 derived from it, all reflected the intention to achieve the
output of 2,550 aircraft per month—the peak rate—during 1942. Even in
the Admiralty the planners looked forward to 1942 as the year when the
supply of small vessels under the 'emergency' programmes would reach
the point beyond which exclusive concentration on the 'emergency'
programmes themselves could stop.4

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From these expectations obvious strategic and economic
consequences
followed. Now that weapons were in more plentiful supply more could be
spared for offensive action, even if the delays over bombers made it
difficult to launch full-scale bombing attacks for at least another
year. The economic consequences were, if anything, even more immediate.
War industry was absorbing its final targets. The year 1942 was
therefore destined to bring the country to the very verge of the
fullest possible industrial mobilisation.

In this way, on the eve of Pearl Harbor the twin summits of the
war,
strategic and economic, were rapidly coming into view. The strategic
and political situation had been transformed by the German attack on
Russia in June 1941, though the effects of German involvement in the
East on British strategic planning did not become apparent until the
strength of Russian resistance revealed itself in full, as it did
during 1942. More directly relevant to Britain's economic and strategic
plans was the evolving attitude of the United States. On the eve of
Pearl Harbor American aid was already great, and prospects of further
aid were rapidly rising. The events of the winter of 1941—Pearl Harbor,
the entry of the United States and Japan into the war—greatly amplified
both the prejudice and the promise of 1941, and thereby intensified the
crises to which the country was in any case moving. They brought
immense accretion to Allied strength and a firm assurance of victory,
but they also raised the height of the peaks yet to be scaled and
probably also the length of time which this country would have to stay
at topmost levels. It suddenly became possible to embark on offensives
greater and more far-reaching than any which Britain could have
undertaken alone; and it also became necessary to raise military output
and economic mobilisation to limits even higher than those which the
pre-1942 programmes had forecast. At the same time the offensive action
could not be planned to reach its dénouement
for at least another eighteen months or two years; nor were the strains
of industrial mobilisation expected to ease off in the meantime.

The sustained height of the war effort during those years and,
above
all, the combination of full industrial mobilisation with mounting
military offensives, must be borne in mind if the story of war
production in this period is to be properly understood. War industry
was called upon to continue its movement towards the inherited targets
of its earlier plans; it was also called upon to respond to the
successive stimuli of the offensive strategy; and all this had to be
done at a time when the productive resources and, above all, the
manpower of the country were stretched to the furthest possible limits.

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(2)

The Offensive Strategy

The changing emphasis of war production reflected not only the
growing
shortage of manpower but also the constant and unremitting pressure for
expansion—a pressure to which the country found it increasingly
difficult to respond, but which strategic necessity made it equally
difficult to dent. It would be a truism to insist that between 1942 and
1944 the demand for supplies was bound to expand with every step of the
unfolding offensive. Somewhat less obvious and familiar are the effects
on supply programmes of the slow and necessarily circuitous progress of
the offensive plans. With the entry of America into the war the
military prospects underwent a transformation as profound as most
contemporaries wished it to be. Eventual victory now appeared to be
assured and the road towards it more or less open. Yet the military
position did not alter at all suddenly. While future horizons were
lightening and spirits were rising, the immediate prospects remained
for a while gloomy. Until the very eve of Alamein and Stalingrad the
Allies continued to suffer reverses in every field of battle—in the
Philippines, in Malaya, in the Western Desert, in the Atlantic and in
the approaches to the Caucasus.

No comparable reverses were likely on the supply front, but enough
has
already been said here to show that 1942 was bound to be a year of
great difficulties and shortages. Indeed the first phase of the
Anglo-American alliance turned out to be one of unrelieved stringency.
At the end of 1941 American war industry was still in the early stages
of expansion and was not to be fully employed or to be working at
maximum rates until well into 1943. There was even some deterioration
in the immediate outlook, for weapons manufactured for British use in
the United States were being diverted to the American Army, and the
vast ambitions of American war industry were threatening the supply of
critical raw materials. In these conditions it was obviously impossible
for Britain and the United States to come to grips with the main forces
of the enemy at once. However certain the victory, the road towards it
was turning out to be both longer and more roundabout than it may at
first have appeared to some Allied leaders. Its true length and
direction were not to be revealed until most of its distance had been
traversed.

The mapping of the road began immediately after the Pearl Harbor.
Within three weeks of America' entry into the war Mr. Churchill and Mr.
Roosevelt met in Washington to consider the broad strategy of the
war.5 They had no difficulty
in agreeing on the strategic

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priorities. As Germany was the predominant member of the
Axis powers, the Atlantic and the European area was to be considered
the decisive theatre of the war, and only the minimum of force
necessary to safeguard vital interests in other theatres was to be
diverted from operations against Germany.

The date and direction of the main attack were not, however, and
could
not be settled at once. In the spring of 1942 General Marshall came to
London with a plan for an early and even an immediate offensive in
Western Europe. He proposed that Allied troops should invade Europe and
establish a bridgehead there as soon as possible, indeed in the autumn
of 1942. This operation if successful was to lead in 1943 to a
full-dress invasion of Europe (Operation 'Round-up'). These dates,
however, proved too early and too definite. In general, the British
leaders were prepared to accept the American proposal for an offensive
in Western Europe in the spring of 1943. In a manner still more
general, they agreed that the Allies might be compelled to launch an
attack, however limited, in 1942 or might be induced to do so a
favourable opening occurred. Before long, however, both the date and
the point of the attack were revised. At a further conference between
the President and the Prime Minister in Washington in June 19426
the
Allies decided to push forward with all speed and energy the building
up of American forces in the United Kingdom for an early offensive.
But, at the same time, they laid it down that if detailed examination
were to show that a successful invasion of France and the Low Countries
was as yet impracticable, the Allies must be ready with an alternative
plan for an early operation against German land forces. As an
alternative, a landing in North Africa—Operation 'Torch'—appeared most
promising and desirable.

When in the following month, July 1942, the United States Chief of
Staff visited England to investigate the possibilities of offensive
action during 1942, the decision to postpone the invasion of the
Continent followed almost inevitably. The bomber offensive had not yet
developed sufficiently to prepare the ground for an Allied landing; the
technique of such landings had not been worked out; the United States
did not yet dispose of large bodies of battle-trained troops, nor did
their war industry turn out supplies in the necessary quantities. The
smaller and purely preliminary alternative in North Africa had
therefore to be launched first.

The invasion of North Africa took place as planned; yet even after
it
had been completed—in the early summer of 19437—the
culminating
point
of the offensive was still far off. While preparations for the North
African campaign were in full swing, attention and resources

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had to be diverted to other military objectives. The German
advance into Egypt was a strategic threat of the greatest gravity, and
the preparations to repulse it, which had been going on throughout
1942, could not be held up. Nor was it possible to stop or even to
reduce the assistance to Russia. Measures purely military, such as help
for the defence of the Caucasus or the invasion of northern Norway were
seriously considered but proved impracticable. On the other hand,
supplies to the White Sea ports were absorbing on ever-mounting volume
of resources, and were not allowed to slacken off. At the same time an
assault on Madagascar had to be planned and was executed in May 1942.
Above all the Allies, more especially the Americans, had to do all that
was possible to prevent the position in the Pacific from becoming even
more critical than it was. In this country there was also the
ever-present, and at time overshadowing threat to Atlantic sea-lanes,
were throughout 1942 and the first half of 1943 the German U-boats were
levying a heavy toll.

For these and the more general reasons of strategy and supplies
(which
in the main were still those of 1942) the success in North Africa was
not to be followed by an immediate switch-over to France. The Prime
Minister and the President met at Casablanca in January 19438
and
decided to follow up the success in Tunisia with an attack of Sicily,
to be launched in June or July.9 The
invasion of Sicily was followed
by other moves in the encircling offensive. The Italian mainland was
invaded on 3rd September, and when Mussolini fled and Italian
resistance collapsed in the autumn of 1943, the British military
leaders were anxious to complete the campaign in the south, even at the
cost of some further postponement of the invasion of France. The
problem occupied the Allied leaders at the Quebec Conference of August
1943, and at Cairo discussions in November 1943; and it was only at
Teheran,10 where Stalin joined
the President and the Prime Minister
for the first time, that the 'Overlord' operation in Northern France
and the accompanying invasion of Southern France were fixed for May
1944 with the clear understanding that no other operation would be
allowed to interfere with their date and success.

In these final decisions the argument of supply played a decisive
part.
Hitherto it had been possible to contend that, although the long-term
objectives of military equipment were nearly attained, there still
remained the task of preparing the specialised equipment without which
the final offensive in France could not be launched, and, in the first
place, the all-important landing-craft. The reason why the summer of
1944 could at last be fixed as the final date for 'Overlord' was not
only that the preliminary phases of the encircling offensive had

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been successfully carried out and that the bombing attacks
on Germany were approaching the point of highest intensity, but also
that the preliminary supply tasks appeared capable of being completed
in time.

The strategic plans of the Allies in their turn had profound
economic
and, more especially, industrial effects. Not only was war industry
called upon to supply very large quantities of special equipment for
the coming offensive, but it was also subjected to a heavy and at the
same time irregular pressure from the so-to-speak intermediate
strategic needs. The offensive strategy developed over a period so long
and was compounded of preparatory activities so dispersed and so
divergent that the flow of offensive weapons had to be kept not only
high but also very elastic. Incidents, all of them critical, came in
quick succession: the bombing offensive, the massing of troops and
supplies for the battles in Libya and Tunisia, the critical stages in
the Battle of the Atlantic, the mounting of the landings in Sicily and
Italy, and the maintenance of the armies there. They all raised urgent
demands which had to be satisfied rapidly, and sometimes concurrently,
before final concentration on 'Overlord' could be decreed at the end of
1943. And no sooner was the landing launched than urgent demands began
to come in from the armies in the fields of battle and from the air
force over them. At the end of the period, while the prospects of
victory in Europe were drawing near, the requirements of war in the Far
East were coming to the forefront.

Is there then any wonder that the progress of war production
during
those years was irregular as well as great? Requirements had to be
constantly reassessed in the order of military urgency, and the course
of war production was therefore bound to be highly unstable. Yet the
general tendency towards expansion, though repeatedly checked, was
never arrested. In so far as additional demands merged into the
periodic Service programmes (as the bulk of them did) they will be
recounted again later;11 but it is not
necessary to catalogue them
in
order to account for the growing industrial tasks. The growth reflected
itself in every direction: in the higher demands for munitions, the
rising requirements for raw materials, and, above all, in the
ever-larger demands for labour.

(3)

The Economic Strains

The culminating point in the military preparations, i.e. the
opening up of the offensive the inevitably heightened pressure of

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requirements for munitions, coincided with the final stages
in the industrial mobilisation. These stages were bound to be fraught
with difficulty. As the peaks of industrial activity were coming into
view the concomitant stresses were becoming more pronounced and more
difficult to relieve. The 'limiting' factors of wartime industries as
they figured in all the rearmament plans—machine tools, raw materials,
labour—were now beginning to exercise to the full their limiting
effect. At the same time not all the productive resources were equally
strained, and the various shortages did not constrict war industry in
equal measure. What is more, the worst strains were not those which had
done most to hold back industrial expansion in the early phases of
rearmament.

Capacity—factories and machines—was ceasing to be the pace-maker
of war
industry. If, until 1942, the output of munitions did not grow—and
indeed was not expected to grow—much faster than it did, the main
reason was that the country was still 'tooling up'. And if, in its
turn, this process dragged on for several long and impatient years, the
obvious (though, of course, not the only) explanation was that demands
for fixed capital were so great that they could not possibly be met
sooner. Factory buildings took a long time to erect (on the whole much
longer than in the war of 1914–18),13
while the supply of plant and
machine tools, not only in this country but also in the United States,
was for a long time unequal to the need. By the end of 1942, however,
the general position had greatly changed. Capital equipment was ceasing
to be short; supply had caught up with demand, and in 1943 the demand
itself dropped well below the peak.

That the demand should have decreased at this stage of the war
was, of
course, in the nature of the industrial build-up. Hitherto the whole
timetable of British rearmament had largely depended on the rate at
which new factories could be brought into production or other factories
be converted to munitions; and this meant that some time before the
highest levels of war production were reached the making of fixed
capital equipment should have begun to slow down. The turning-point
under the programmes of 1939 and 1940 would have come some time before
Pearl Harbor, and soonest of all in the aircraft industry. Throughout
the greater part of 1941 the Ministry of Aircraft Production was still
engaged on the original programme of 2,550 aircraft per months. The
programme had been approved in general terms in September 1939,14
and
between that date and August 1941 orders had been placed for the bulk
of the necessary Government expenditure on plant and
buildings—£97 millions out of about £110 millions. Had the
programme been allowed to run its

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course, the requirements of capital equipment would
probably have begun to diminish in the autumn of 1941. In the Ministry
of Supply the turning-point was expected to come later, somewhere early
in 1942, for it was in the course of 1942 that production under the
Z+27
programme15 was due to reach its
zenith. In the Admiralty the capital
schemes launched in the first two years of the war were mainly to
expand capacity for armaments and ammunition, and there were also
expected to mature at the end of 1941 or early in 1942.

Thus, according to the original production plans, the process of
industrial re-equipment would have culminated at the turn of 1941 and
1942. The process was not, however, allowed to run according to plan.
Even before the date of completion arrived, the supply departments had
to sponsor additions to factory programmes and to extend the period of
'tooling up'. Greatest of all were the additions to the aircraft
factories resulting from the bomber programmes of the late autumn of
1941. It will be recalled16 that the Prime
Minister's wishes for
additional bombers could not be met even half-way without additional
factory construction. There were also to be changes in plant and
machines and additions to the machining capacity in general in a number
of existing factories. Hence there was a very large increase in orders
for plant and machine tools at the end of 1941 and during 1942. Indeed
so large was the increase that the approved financial commitments for
additional plant and machinery sanctioned for engines, airframes and
propellers from September 1941 to December 1942, at nearly £48
millions, were more than twice that of the comparable commitments
between December 1939 and the end of August 1941, and only £6.5
millions less than the total commitment for the provision of plant and
machinery, at Government expense,

for this section of the aircraft industry in the five years
since 1936. The increase in plant and machinery requirements over the
whole field of aircraft production was only slightly less severe. The
peak requirements of the Ministry of Aircraft Production for capital
goods were thus inevitably put off to some in 1943.

Important additions to capital, though on a much smaller scale,
also
too place in the shipbuilding industry. It will be shown later18
that
in the middle of 1942 the Admiralty reached an impasse in its
endeavours to force out of the shipbuilding industry a large increase
in output. This led to a technical enquiry which, in its turn, led to
an ambitious plan for a State-assisted renovation of capital equipment
in the shipyards. Large and costly machine tools were to be provided as
well as shipyard plant and welding equipment. In consequence the total
value of major capital schemes for naval shipbuilding and marine
engineering for the two years 1942 and 1943 exceeded £4½
millions, compared with less than £1 million for the two years
1940 and 1941. In addition a further large scheme for torpedo
production was approved in 1942. The large increase in capital
equipment for naval construction and marine engineering which followed
the 1942 inquiry is reflected in the Admiralty expenditure on this
account (Table 27).

In the Ministry of Supply alone the additions were not
sufficiently
large to lead to a great postponement of the decline, which in any case
was planned to come later there than elsewhere. In the capital schemes
approved in 1942 provision of plant and machine tools at more than
£26 millions was only £2 millions lower than in 1941,
though more than £16 millions higher than the figure to which it
was to drop in the course of 1943. The 1941 level of demand for capital
was thus prolonged throughout the greater part of 1942 but fell sharply
in 1943. But for the further schemes for the tank programme and for the
increasing demand for 20-mm. weapons and ammunition the 1943 figure
would have been lower still, and the drop might have come earlier.

The compilation of total requirements of machine tools for
delivery in
each year was undertaken by the Machine Tool Control from 1941

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onwards. The process was subject to much uncertainty, and figures
computed at the beginning of the year were subject to drastic changes
in the course of the year. The actual demands for machine tools, on
which orders for delivery were issued, frequently differed widely from
these estimated requirements. Requirements were related almost entirely
to demands arising out of financial projects of capital expenditure
financed and subsidised from Government sources, but there was also a
smaller flow of order emanating directly from private firms and
financed wholly by them. Outside the official lists were also the
machine tools and gauges, for labour training schemes, for export and
for replacement of worn-out and of war-damaged machines. In 1940 and
1941 the annual total requirements was estimated at 100,000 machine
tools. In 1942, when returns became more complete, the estimate reached
111,000. Reckoned in number the estimated decline in 1943 and 1944 was
remarkably small, but the needs of these years were for a larger
proportion of low-cost machines and for a larger number of machines to
replace worn-out machinery in factories.19

The turning-point in the total demand for plant and machine tools
was thus postponed; but it was bound to come before long. Allowing for
the interval between the date at which expenditure was sanctioned and
the date at which orders could be placed, the end of 1942 might be
regarded as the time when the pressure of demand for capital equipment
in war industry as a whole would begin to fall off.

The general position, however, improved some time before that
point was reached. Although the total demand had been fast approaching
the highest point, the supplies of machine tools and plant were growing
faster still. For this, American deliveries were partly responsible.
During 1940 and 1941 the number of machine tools supplied to the United
Kingdom from the United States was at a record level of four times the
number supplied from the United States in 1939, and at least three and
a half times the 1939 tonnage. The main source, however, was not
American supplies but the ever-expanding production at home. Indeed,
the growth of the British machine-tool industry during the war was very
remarkable. From less than 20,000 machines in 1935 and about 35,000 in
1939 the British output of machine tools approached 100,000 by 1942.

For the early stages of the expansion the pre-war planners may
claim some credit. In the war of 1914–18 the shortage of machine tools,
jigs and gauges was one of the main limiting factors of war production.
The machine-tool and gauge problem consequently figured very
prominently in the inter-war discussions of industrial mobilisation and
in the investigations conducted by the Supply Board.26
As a result a
good deal had been achieved by 1939. The output of standard machines to
meet rearmament requirements and to maintain exports had expanded, and
new capacity27 had also been
developed for gauges and for special
machines for gun and shell production. But much more was needed, and in
the end much more was done. In the early years of the war the output of
machine tools directed by the Machine Tool Control in the Ministry of
Supply grew from month to month and reached by the end of 1942 a point
far beyond the scope of pre-war expectations. There was also a
commensurate expansion in the output of the supply of small
tools—cutting tools and equipment, gauges and measuring instruments.

This achievement was one of the great industrial successes of the
war. What made it possible was the remarkable response of the
established machine-tool firms, but one of the most important features
of the growing output was the contribution made by undertakings not
previously engaged in the manufacture of machine tools. In the end
about a third of the output came from a large number of 'general'

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engineering firms. The manufacture of many types of machine tools
was, of course, well suited to the qualities and limitations of
medium-sized and small firms in the British engineering industry. Yet
even so their contribution revealed reserves of skill and adaptability
out of the ordinary.

Thus, after Pearl Harbor domestic production was able to meet the
bulk of British requirements for machine tools and dependence on
American supplies was increasingly confined to machine tools of certain
sizes and of highly specialised design. But even in this field the
country was becoming less dependent on imports. Successful endeavours
to replace continental types and some United States types with United
Kingdom products go back to 1940 and beyond. In 1941, with the growing
stringency of supplies from the United States, the Machine Tool Control
arranged for further new types to be introduced to replace some United
States designs, including gear-cutting and specialised milling
machines. As a result, the range of types not manufactured in the
United Kingdom was narrowed down, and the need for foreign tools was
correspondingly reduced.

It goes without saying that however fast and however successfully

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the general problem of plant and machinery was being
solved, local shortages and difficulties continued to occur. Throughout
1942, and even in 1943 and 1944, delays and failures in production
could still, more or less justly, be blamed on non-delivery of plant
and tools. Small as the arrears were now becoming, even small arrears
were capable of delaying production, especially if they happened to
include critical key tools. The Ministry of Aircraft Production was
especially difficult to satisfy. Not only was it deemed for machine
tools at a very high level in 1942, but it was especially sensitive to
unbalancing effects of production 'shortfalls'. For the M.A.P.
requirements contained a high proportion of 'difficult' tools and, in
addition, were to a great extent made up of large production units,
sometimes whole factories, which took on the average not less than
twelve months and sometimes as many as eighteen months to complete. For
this and other reasons it is not surprising to find M.A.P. complaining
about arrears in the supply of machine tools in May 1942 and again in
October of that year and at the beginning of 1943. The Machine Tool
Control was reassuring about the prospects and could claim that by the
end of 1942 not more than 2,300 machine tools, or about seven percent
of the requirements, remained undelivered. But improvements were all
very recent—mostly in the last months of 1942—and among the machines
still in arrears were large plano-millers essential for the manufacture
of the long spars of airframes and certain specially-designed machines
vital for the manufacture of engines and propellers.

M.A.P. could thus claim that delays in delivery of machines not
only
upset the timing of major programmes but also impeded necessary changes
of types. Thus, in December 1942 when a changeover from Stirlings and
Wellingtons to Lancasters was considered for Austin's, Short's and
Vickers', it was found that the changeover could only be made at either
Short's or Vickers' but not at both, through lack of sufficient
specially-designed plano-millers of large size. In December 1942 eleven
more of these machine tools were required for existing Lancaster
production; twelve more were required for the changeover at Short's and
eighteen more at Vickers'. Against this total of forty-one
plano-millers the best delivery was twelve in nine months and four per
month to follow. Thus, whilst the general statistics showed the
requirements as fully or almost fully met, serious delays in the supply
of key machines could still be held responsible for failures in
production.

Needless to say, this argument was not accepted in full, and was
often
met by the arguments that the M.A.P. demands were inflated, that the
existing machine-tool capacity was not fully worked, and that in any
case the industry did not possess the labour necessary to work the new
machines. The labour arguments was of course double-edged,

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for machines were often needed to economise in labour and
also to train new cadres. But the argument that the requirements were
exaggerated could not be dismissed by mere denial. That by the end of
1941 the industry had accumulated a great deal of redundant plant and
machinery appeared very probable. In the summer of 1941 the Controller
General of the Machine Tools Control could refer without fear of
contradiction to the surplus of machine tools in certain M.A.P.
factories as something generally known; and a few weeks later the
M.A.P. Director of Machine Tools reported to the Supply Board that in
his estimate some 10,000–12,000 machine tools were idle through
shortage of labour and equipment or for other reasons and that some
50,000 were inefficiently operated through lack of skilled labour. The
same view was to be expressed in a manner characteristically
unambiguous by Lord Beaverbrook, now Minister of Supply. In a
memorandum to the Defence Committee (Supply) relating to the Prime
Minister's bomber programme, Lord Beaverbrook stated categorically that
for the bomber programme:

no more machine tools are needed, over 30,000 new tools were
directed
to M.A.P. factories in 1941. The machine-tool plant must be worked
night and day. Some special-purpose machine tools must be provided. The
flow of replenishments and renewals must be maintained. But the main
jobs are all completed and in fact some consignments of tools remain
unused and even unpacked.

The categorical opening of this memorandum was qualified in its
later
sections, but its main argument still implied that at least half of the
30,000 machine tools asked for were unnecessary.

Lord Beaverbrook's criticisms of M.A.P. demands or the more
moderately
expressed criticisms by the Machine Tool Control could be neither
generally disproved nor upheld until April 1942, when M.A.P. at last
agreed to have its machine-tool demands examined by technical experts
of the Machine Tool Control. The object of the examination was to check
the requirements of new machine tools as stated by M.A.P. against the
Machine Tool Control's own calculation of what would be needed if the
most suitable machine tools were most effectively used. As a result of
the inquiry the utilisation of tools may or may not have improved, but
M.A.P. requirements lost some of the controversial aura which had
hitherto surrounded them. It is very probable that even then the
industry continued to possess a reserve of machining capacity. When in
the earlier stages of discussion Lord Beaverbrook and others had tried
to apply to the M.A.P. requirements of double-shift working, M.A.P.
insisted that the only realistic level for measuring utilisation of
tools was by assuming that machines would be worked to the extent of
not
more than 165 percent, i.e. 65 percent above their hypothetical full
utilisation in a single shift. It is, nevertheless, doubtful whether
even

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165 percent of utilisation was attained in machining shops
throughout the aircraft industry, and it is more or less certain that
the coefficient of utilisation in some branches of aircraft production
remained considerably lower than that.

The hang-over of the machine-tool problem also continued to be
felt in the branches of production controlled by the Admiralty and the
Ministry of Supply, but in neither department did it appear as
troublesome or as persistent as in M.A.P. Their demands—especially
those of the Ministry of Supply—were not linked to a single large
production scheme like the 'bomber programme', capable of being delayed
in its entirety by local shortages of vital machines. The Ministry of
Supply also enjoyed the advantages of fairly interchangeable industrial
capacity and of somewhat less exacting requirements.

In so far as the Ministry of Supply requirements contained large
and specialised machines, or were made of complete production
complements, delays continued for some time after the general problem
of supplies appeared to be solved. Thus, the factory programme for
production of the Meteor tank engine, involving some 850 machines, both
British and American, took eighteen months to complete; it was approved
early in 1943, but the delivery of machine tools for full production
was not completed until November 1944. Generally speaking, 'critical'
machines, i.e. those of special design or otherwise in short supply,
could not be made available in under twelve months except by transfer
of existing orders. Fortunately, from 1942 onwards the Ministry asked
for relatively few 'difficult' machines. And even when machines were
required in complete production units, as for 20-mm. ammunition, fuses
and small arms, or for tank engines, the units were usually much
smaller than those required by M.A.P. In general, new machine tools in
the Ministry's programme were to an increasing extent required not to
tool up new capacity but to convert existing munitions capacity for the
production of new types of weapons and ammunition.

Increases in the demand for general tools such as there were (a
large part consisted of workshop tools of smaller and portable type for
the Army) did not raise serious difficulties. By the end of 1942 they
could be supplied within six to nine months, and in the course of that
year many machines were being delivered at a rate which kept pace with
the rate of requirements. From 1943 onwards a rapidly increasing number
of machines on the Ministry of Supply list were becoming redundant and
were passing into the Machine Tool Control pool; private orders for
replacement of worn-out machines were increasing and in many instances
were easily met.

There was, however, some delay in the delivery of machines under
the Admiralty scheme of shipyard renovation.31
The delivery dates

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for the heavier and more specialised machine tools for shipyards
and engine-makers, such as hydraulic presses, joggling and flanging
machines, riveting machines and special horizontal boring machines,
were invariably long—indeed in some cases so long as to extend the
period of re-equipment for about eight to nine months beyond the end of
1943 which was the planned date of completion. There was some feeling
in the Admiralty that the delays were in part due to interference by
Russian orders for similar machinery, though the Machine Tool Control
did not admit that Russian orders had any great effect. Difficulties
may also have been caused by lack of finality and definition in the
technical requirements of the shipbuilding firms. Yet great as these
difficulties were, they were not such as to upset the programme as a
whole. In general, the requirements of the yards were filled more or
less on time. Thus, in the supply of welding machines, which formed a
crucial part of the modernisation scheme, the measures taken by the
Machine Tool Control to standardise a large percentage of the welding
machines and to scrutinise the Admiralty demands for machines above a
certain size made it possible to fulfil the programme without delay.
Some ninety percent of the welding schemes were completed by the autumn
of 1943, at least a couple of months before the terminal date of the
renovation scheme as a whole.

The shortage which on the morrow of Pearl Harbor appeared most
dangerous and most immediate was that of raw materials. It was to prove
much less crippling in the event than it appeared in anticipation;
there is, however, no doubt that until well into 1943 the anticipations
were very disturbing. From May 1941 imports of raw materials increased
to a rate which was sufficiently well above current consumption to
raise the stocks of materials subject to import programme by several
million tons above what in 1942 was to be regarded as the minimum
'distribution' stocks required to keep the flow of production
uninterrupted. In the autumn of 1941 the prospects for a short time
appeared still brighter, and the Government hoped that imports of raw
materials would be higher in the course of 1942 than in 1941. Even
when, by the middle of November, the import programmes had to be
reduced to allow for the mounting demands of Russia and of the Middle
East and for the slowing down of American shipping assistance, the
expected imports of raw materials in 1942 were still planned at
approximately the same levels as the actual imports of 1941.

These hopes did not survive Pearl Harbor. The Japanese conquests

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in the Far East removed several sources of important raw
materials. Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies and the neighbouring
territories had produced ninety percent of the world's rubber supplies,
sixty percent of the world's tin and also quantities of sisal. In the
Philippines the Allies lost the only source of manilla hemp, and
elsewhere in the Far East they lost supplies of tungsten, chromite,
antimony and hardwood. Not all these losses were wholly and permanently
irreplaceable. There were hopes of expanding rubber production
elsewhere, especially in Ceylon, and the production of synthetic rubber
was due to develop on a large scale in the United States. The mining of
tin could be expanded in Nigeria, the Belgian Congo and Bolivia, and
the loss of tin-smelting capacity was to be made good by the new
American smelter already in process of erection in Texas. Yet all these
schemes could not mature at once, and even when mature they could not
be expected to make good the entire deficiency.

In addition, the immediate prospects of supplies for Britain were,
for
the time being, dimmed by the inevitable increase in America's own
demands arising mainly out of her immense armament plans. Most serious
of all was the threat to the allocations of steel and non-ferrous
metals, especially copper; and in this respect the situation remained
dangerous until late in 1942, i.e. until the United States' munitions
programmes had been pruned sufficiently to revive, at least in part,
hopes of continued American supplies to Britain.

More important still, indeed much more important, was the new
shipping
situation. In 1942 the Y-boat activities in the Atlantic raised the
rate of sinkings to new and alarming peaks. At the same time the demand
for shipping was greatly swollen by the military needs of the Eastern
and Middle-Eastern theatres of war and by the gradual development of
the Allied counter-offensive. America's own need of ships in the Far
East and elsewhere reduced the immediate help she could give. Merchant
shipping construction, especially in America, was originally expected
to replace losses and overtake demands by the end of 1942, but in June
it became clear that American shipping assistance would not greatly
increase until the second half of 1943. As a result, the total tonnage
to serve British imports not only failed to grow but was in danger of
continued decline for at least another year or eighteen months. Added
to the shortages of shipping tonnage, both present and future, was also
the difficulty of suiting military shipping to the needs of the import
programme. In theory ships shipping to the needs of the import
programme. In theory ships carrying supplies to the Far East or to the
Mediterranean were available to bring back imports, but in practice the
available cargoes did not necessarily fit the pattern of military
sailings, and ships homeward bound were sometimes compelled to sail not
fully laden and generally to bring imports in proportions no strictly
corresponding to the import programmes.

--212--

It is, therefore, no wonder that the expectations of raw
materials imports had to be drastically reduced. By February 1942 the
high expectations of the autumn of 1941 were cut by more than a
quarter. In the new conditions, supplies of materials had to be planned
on assumptions involving not only far greater economy than before, but
also much greater risks. In considering the import programme in
February 1942 the Lord President decided that the time had come to
reduce expectations of raw materials to the absolute minimum needed for
the war effort, and in so doing to assume that stocks would be reduced
by the end of the year to the safety line. On that basis the Raw
Materials Department of the Ministry of Supply had drastically to
reduce the total volume of requirements and some of the most essential
items in it. Above all, iron and steel and non-ferrous metals were to
be cut to an extent which threatened to reduce stocks of pig iron,
steel and scrap by a very large figure. Stocks of other imported raw
materials33 were also to be drawn
upon.

Yet, even at this level, expectations of imports appeared to be
higher
than the shipping situation justified. At the invitation of the Lord
President the Raw Materials Department of the Ministry of Supply
submitted in February 1942 two programmes of imports both smaller than
the previous much reduced expectations, and in March 1942 Department
had to act on the dismal assumption that the quantity of materials to
be received by sea would be only seventy-five percent of the forecast
in November 1941. At this level imports would be considerably less than
the amount below which, it was though they could not fall without
creating a serious situation. As planned production was expected to
rise in the course of 1943 to its topmost peak and consumption of raw
materials to grow in proportion, the accumulated deficiency over the
eighteen months from January 1942 to July 1943 looked as if it might
exceed the safety figure by a wide margin.

It will be shown presently that, in fact, the situation in the
second half of 1942 did not deteriorate quite so badly and that no
serious shortages developed. This, however, was not sufficient to
relieve the fears for the still more distant future. Even though in
the course of 1943 American assistance was expected greatly to relieve
the shipping position, the authorities expected that further
dislocation of import programmes would result from the offensive
campaigns of the Allies. At the same time consumption was due to rise
in keeping with earlier plans, and the munitions industries alone were
due to consume 12.5 percent more raw materials in 1943 than in 1942.
The prospects was very disturbing, and what made it still more
disturbing was that in the last quarter of 1942 the rate of sinkings
rose and the amount of

--213--

tonnage diverted to military preparations was greater than
expected. At the level of imports that could now be expected, reserves
set aside to meet unforeseen emergencies might at the end of the year
be reduced to three to four weeks' supply.

Indeed, so dangerous appeared the position and prospects of stocks
that the Prime Minister was obliged in December 1942 to intervene with
a direction that stocks should not be allowed to drop to a level which
would leave this country without 'elbow room' for possible
contingencies. This meant cancelling the assumption on which the
current programmes were based, i.e. that this country would run down
its stocks of imported raw materials to the level of 'distribution'
stocks. The new 'elbow room' was set by the Ministry of Production at a
figure which was near the level at which stocks of imported raw
materials had stood at the end of 1942. The estimates of consumption in
1943 had therefore to be reduced accordingly, and above all, heroic
measures had to be taken to maintain the rate of imports. And nothing
was more 'heroic' than the Prime Minister's decision to sanction the
withdrawal of ships from military uses. In accordance with is
direction, fifty-two out of every ninety-two ships which it had been
planned to use for the carrying of military stores to the Indian Ocean
during the first six months of 1943 were to be diverted to bring
imports to the United Kingdom.

For a few months in 1943 the position appeared to deteriorate
still further, partly through a sharp fall in the amount of shipping
space allocated from the United States, but also through severe
weather. The position was expected to improve in the second half of
1943; yet allowing for all possible improvements, the Minister of
Production unofficially estimated in the spring that it would not be
possible to import during 1943 anything like the amounts budgeted for.
A grave deficiency thus appeared inevitable. The requirements of the
production departments had been pruned in January 1943 to a level which
was below that of 1942, but as consumption of raw material in general
had been running at a relatively high rate during the last three
quarters of 1942, it was difficult to cut it sufficiently to satisfy
the Prime Minister's expressed with for 'elbow room' over and above the
minimum distribution stocks themselves might have to be raided, and if
so, the flow of production would not be sustained.

Sustained it nevertheless was. At no time during the period was
munitions production in the country interrupted or even slowed down by
a failure in the supply of raw materials in the narrow sense of the
term
but to the 'fabricated' materials—rolled products, castings, forgings,
etc.—and were due not so much to difficulties of import as

--214--

to problems of fabrication in this country. At no time were stocks
of imported raw materials in general drawn upon to the extent which the
Lord President of the Council and the Raw Material Department had been
forced to contemplate at the beginning of 1942. This was due in part to
a decline in munitions requirements, but also to the steps which the
Ministry of Production took in April 1943 to restrict consumption.

The cumulative reductions of stocks over the eighteen months
January 1942 to June 1943 are difficult to compute with any exactitude,
but they were certainly nowhere near the figure which once seemed
inevitable, and what is more, total stocks of raw materials began to
rise again by midsummer 1943. In the three months June to August 1943
they rose by nearly 1.5 million tons.

The relatively satisfactory condition of stocks and supplies was
partly due to a flow of imports better than at one time seemed
probably. In the first six months of 1942 and again at the turn of 1942
and 1943, imports were below programme, but, with the possible
exception of the opening months of 1943, they never dropped below the
safety line. Over the period as a whole the actual flow of imports was
above the minimum programmes, and from late spring 1943 onwards the
position improved very rapidly. The early months of the year saw a
decisive turn in the Battle of the Atlantic, and a little later the
military success in North Africa and Italy opened the Mediterranean to
Allied shipping. As a result, more goods arrived than forecast; and the
American promises of shipping assistance also proved easier to fulfil.
No doubt supplies of individual commodities still remained very
difficult. Above all, as more shipping was made available, so did the
difficulty of finding appropriate cargoes in foreign ports grow.34
Nevertheless, by June 1943 the total of non-tanker imports reached the
highest level since October 1941, and, as mentioned above, stocks of
imported raw materials were beginning to rise. By the end of 1943 they
were higher than at the beginning of the year and well above the
'distribution' minimum.

Mutatis mutandis, the
situation in 1943, with imports and stocks higher than the more
pessimistic forecasts, was recreated in 1944. Although the year began
with hopes higher than ever before, certain dangers were anticipated.
The needs of the offensive on the Continent were expected to put a
strain on shipping, and inland transport was also heavily burdened.
Nevertheless, imports in the first half of 1944 ran higher than even
the more hopeful versions of the programmes allowed.

The higher rate of imports in 1943 and 1944 was not only, and.

--215--

perhaps not even the main, cause of the satisfactory rate of
supplies. Domestic sources also proved very buoyant. The production of
iron ore had reached its peak in 1942 when nearly 20 million tons were
produced, eight million tons more than in 1938,35
and, what is more
important, one million tons more than in 1941. In 1943 3.7 million tons
of domestic timber had been felled, slightly more than had been assumed
in earlier discussions.

The main relief, however, came neither from the better
rate of imports nor from the higher output from domestic sources, but
from a much reduced consumption. Consumption would in any case have run
below estimates. The expected demands for raw materials, like all other
estimates of requirements for war production, were computed on the
assumption that all other factors of production would be available in
planned proportions at the right times and in the proper places, and
that production of munitions would run at full programme rates. This
assumption, of course, highly unreal and inevitably led to
over-estimates in every individual item of the programmes. In addition,
most estimates in the programmes contained insurance margins against
contingencies and sometimes against possible cuts. It is, therefore, no
wonder that the demand for raw materials in 1942, as anticipated in
February 1942, turned out to be nearly twenty percent higher than the
actual intake of raw materials by industry in that year. The estimates
were revised in the middle of the year; yet even in their June version
they were about nine percent higher than actual consumption. The
over-estimates were especially marked in programmes for steel,
non-ferrous metals and softwood—all of them materials where shortages
were expected to be most serious.

This tendency to over-estimate, inherent in the nature of
wartime programmes, did not cease, but in general the margins over
over-estimates

--216--

estimates were themselves becoming small. In the same period,
however, the gap between supply and requirements narrowed down to an
extent far greater than improved estimates alone can explain. A further
and more potent cause will be found in further reduction of
requirements which were forced upon the Ministries by economic
circumstances. This time what was being reduced was not only the
requirements of raw materials based on current production programmes,
but the current production programmes themselves. In December 1942 the
Prime Minister, in his endeavours to protect stocks, enjoined upon the
Ministries drastic reductions in their requirements of imported raw
materials.38 But even before these
economies could be carried into
effect the supply departments, and in the first place the Ministry of
Supply, had to cut
down most of their forward plans for expansion. For in the meantime the
shortage of manpower became so pronounced that it made general
retrenchment in economic effort inevitable. Consumption of raw
materials was bound to follow suit. The peak demands were reached
earlier than originally planned, somewhere in the middle of 1943, and
ran at lower levels. In short, the main reason why the deficiency of
labour was far greater.

(c)
THE LABOUR FAMINE

The growing shortage of labour was rapidly becoming the main
obstacle
to continued expansion, the one limiting factor to which all others
were rapidly reduced. The difficulties of labour supplies had been, of
course, the inescapable accompaniment of industrial progress from the
earliest days of rearmament.39 But
whereas before the end of 1941 the
labour problems were mostly local and were largely confined to skilled
workers, by 1942 the labour problem had become that of manpower in
general.

It is not that the shortages of skilled labour were no
longer
felt. Dilution and training had much progressed and the total number of
skilled operatives, more especially of skilled engineers, was now very
much greater than it had been at the beginning of the war. By the
middle of 1942 one and a quarter million people in the engineering
industry alone were drawing skilled rates of pay as compared with about
half that number in June 1940 in the 'engineering and allied
industries'.40 But skilled men's
wages did not always go to wholly
skilled men. Managers now frequently complained that the quality of

--217--

skilled labour was much lower, even if the quantity was
higher. What is more, even the quantity, high as it was, was not equal
to the demand. For in spite of up-grading, dilution and concentration
of production41 the demand was growing
with the general expansion of
war industry and also with the development of new techniques requiring
special training and aptitude. Welding was probably the most insatiable
of the new skilled grades. In the course of 1942, 1943 and 1944 welding
came to be adopted in almost every branch of metal-working. The change
in shipbuilding was perhaps the most abrupt, and more will be said
about it later,42 but welded
construction had also made great headway
in the manufacture of aircraft, gun carriages, engineering stores and
tanks. Fortunately it did not take as long to train a welder as it did
a skilled worker in alternative processes—a riveter or skilled
foundryman. It was also fortunate that women often proved well fitted
to the delicate and painstaking character of the work and were trained
in very large numbers, more especially in the engineering Royal
Ordnance Factories. Nevertheless, the demand for highly skilled welders
always exceeded the supply. Equally unsatisfied remained the demand for
shipwrights, platers and riveters in the shipyards, toolmakers,
electricians, fitters, draughtsmen and some other higher categories of
industrial skill. In general, shortages of skilled labour were still
sufficiently real to be used as convenient alibi for recurrent
production problems in the aircraft industry and elsewhere. But the
shortage was especially acute in the shipbuilding industry where, in
spite of the technical transformation which was to take place in the
course of 1943, skilled labour was still needed in proportions higher
than those which prevailed in other branches of war industry.

All these difficulties, however, were now merged into the rapidly
growing shortage of labour of every kind and the gradual exhaustion of
manpower resources. The exhaustion was not, of course, unexpected or
unheralded. Manpower was the ultimate limit of the war effort 1914–18,
and eve since the beginning of rearmament the planners and the
administrators of war industry always assumed that if another war were
to come the industrial effort would again be limited by manpower. This
was the obvious postulate of the arguments for and against a large
field army at the beginning of the war, and a rough notion of an
eventual limit of manpower reserves also underlay the later discussions
of the Army intake which were to lead to Mr. Churchill's directive of
March 1941.43

The size of the manpower reserves or the time when they would give
out
could not, of course, be determined in advance with any

--218--

accuracy. Full and reliable manpower budgets were not
available until the last eighteen months of the war, and in the
meantime
it was impossible to measure with any accuracy either the actual needs
or the future requirements of the Services and of war industries. Rough
estimates were, however, made, and were sufficient to foretell a
general
labour shortage some time in 1941 or 1942. Though in its report of May
1940 Lord Stamp's Survey of Economic and Financial Plans was mainly
concerned with the period over which the current programme of war
effort could be achieved, its implied prediction was that manpower
resources would be wholly taken up by the end of the current programme.

On the other hand, the Beveridge committee of the autumn and
winter of
194044 was, as its name
shows, primarily concerned with the future
supplies of men and women for the Services and war industries, and its
findings were not only more definite and precise than anything hitherto
available, but they were also more strictly relevant to the main
problem, of labour resources. On the strength of the evidence available
to it the committee calculated that by the end of 1941 the personnel of
the Forces and of war industries would under their current plans by
some 9.5 millions strong, 3.5 millions more than in mid-1940. The needs
of the fighting Services (including civil defence) would have to be met
largely by drafting into the Services some 1.7 million men, previously
excluded from call-up or shielded from military service by reserved
occupations or otherwise retained by civil occupations or even in war
industry. As a result of these measures the munitions industry stood to
lose some 300,000 men, whereas its estimated needs by the autumn of
1941 were for an additional 1,465,000 workers. The shortage in the
munitions industry would thus be very great—far greater than transfer
of men from other occupations could cover. The committee reckoned that
by getting hold of youths below military age, of older men, and of men
physically unfit, war industry might scrape up a million or so. This
would still leave a deficit of men—300,000 or thereabouts—in the
munitions industry as well of a further deficit of some 700,000 cause
by the withdrawal of men from the non-munitions industries and
services. The deficits, as well as the additional demand of the Forces
and civil defence, could be covered b recruiting some 1,690,000 women,
and in the opinion of the committee this number could not be found
without impinging upon population groups not normally reckoned as
'employable', and in the first place upon married women. This, by
implication, would be the country's last reserve of labour.

The estimates of the Beveridge inquiry were not, and could not, be
borne out in detail, for future demands of both the Forces and war

--219--

industry could not be measured in advance with any
precision; but the general prophecy proved only too true. When in July
1941 the War Cabinet asked for a survey of demands and of resources and
that Ministry of Labour presented its first Manpower Survey based on
its midsummer count of employment books, the state of the country's
manpower resources appeared not far different from the Beveridge
forecast. The total in the Forces and the munitions industries was
about eight millions, not 9.5 millions as anticipated by the Beveridge
Committee, but then the year was not yet up,45
and much of the
Services' demand to the end of the year was still to be met. Moreover,
civil defence and some further 775,000 men and women for munitions and
other essential industries, such as mining and timber. And no sooner
were these figures published than the autumn bomber programmes
presented the Ministry of Labour with additional demands from the
Ministry of Aircraft Production to the tune of 850,000 men and women.46

The country was thus entering 1942 with demands for labour for
that
year at least 1.5 million higher than the figure on which the Beveridge
Committee had based its dismal prophecy and its drastic
recommendations. In other words, even before Pearl Harbor and the
extension of the war to the Far East the country was faced with the
near prospect of a labour famine. The events following Pearl Harbor
brought the prospect of famine nearer still. Throughout 1942 and 1943
the Services and the supply ministries, responding to the rising needs
of the war, presented a series of ever-growing demands for manpower
which far outstripped the possible yield of the country's reservoirs of
men and women.

The reservoirs were in any case being drawn on to the full. The
transfer from other fields of employment had by 1942 gone as far as it
could go, for apart from distributive trades, civil engineering and
building, from which some further transfers were still possible, the
civilian industries and services no longer possessed any big residues
of transferable labour. In order to reinforce the Services the
Government introduced individual deferment in the place of the system
of
reservation hitherto in force under the Schedule of Reserved
Occupations.47 This change was
designed not to disturb production at
its most essential points, but war industry was now bound to lose some
of the men previously shielded from enlistment by the reservation of
entire occupations. The extension of the age of conscription to
fifty-one

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years also impinged on the supplies of males still
available for industrial employment: supplies which had in any case
been attenuated to a mere trickle. There was a small intake of men
invalided from the Services and of older men, of immigrant labour from
Ireland, of timber-workers from Canada and Honduras; later came also
prisoners-of-war. But the contribution of most of these sources could
make was not great, and, from the point of view of war industry, it was
mostly indirect. Prisoners replaced in various outdoor occupations men
drawn into the Services or into war production, but their main spheres
of employment were agriculture and navvying. Irish labour was more
generally available for industrial employment and, on one occasion
early in 1942 a single large batch of Irish labour, shepherded into
this country by the Ministry of Labour, helped to clear a difficult
'bottleneck; in drop-forging labour. Over the period as a whole the
direct contribution from Ireland reached quite a sizeable figure.
During 1940 and 1941 the total number of Irish immigrants who took up
employment in this country exceeded 60,000, and a further 100,000 came
in during 1942 and 1943, but by no means all the immigrants sought
employment in war production or in other essential occupations.

New supplies of labour commensurate with new demands could come
from
the only domestic source not yet exhausted by the beginning of 1942,
i.e. women; and the Government proceeded to mobilise all the women that
could possibly be mobilised. In his early approaches to the problem of
the employment of women, Mr. Bevin may have given the impression of
holding back. But now that all other domestic sources had given out,
and the demands of the war machine were high and urgent, he was
prepared to proceed very quickly and to go very far. In the end the
Ministry of Labour and the War Cabinet in general went farther in this
direction than the war governments of any other country, not excluding
Germany and Russia, and even farther than the advocates of drastic
mobilisation in 1940 had anticipated. The net cast by the Registration
for Employment Order of March 1941 had by October 1942 been spread to
take in the bulk of the young and middle-aged women in the country' by
then all women between the ages of 18 and 45½ had registered at
employment exchanges. When in the summer of 1941 an urgent call for
labour for aircraft production had to be answered, another 20,000 women
or thereabouts were scraped up by extending the registration to
'grandmothers'—the women of 50.

Extension of the age limits was not, of course, in itself the main
instrument of mobilisation. What brought women in was the growing
vigour with which the Orders were applied, the wider use of official
powers, and, above all, the gradual paring down of the definitions of
'immobility' and 'domestic responsibilities' by which a large group of

--221--

women had originally been shielded from mobilisation. In
March 1941 when the registration of women was first introduced, the
measure was directed at 'unoccupied' women.48
Only later in the year
did it aim largely at identifying women in 'less essential'
occupations, and even then its immediate object was not so much to
compel women to move to more essential occupations as to measure and to
locate the supplies immediately available for transfer. But in the
course
of 1942 and 1943 the emphasis gradually changed. Inducement and, in the
end, compulsion had to be used to enforce transfers. Power of direction
were extend to mobile women already in employment and the, by degrees,
the definitions of mobility and the grounds for exemption were
tightened. In the spring of 1942 exemption from work on grounds of
'household responsibilities' was confined to women looking after at
least one other person. In practice, the immunity was narrowed down
still further to women looking after children living at home; all other
women with 'household responsibilities' were to be regarded as
available for work, full-time or part-time. And if, at the time, women,
deemed available only for part-time work, were not yet subjected to
compulsory direction, within a year this later exemption was also
removed.

By these measures the Ministry of Labour succeeded in decanting
into
the Forces and into war industry the entire supply of the country's
employable women. Thereby the level of employment in the country was
lifted to an exceptionally high peak. By the middle of 1943 the total
employment in the country (including the Forces) reached 22 millions,
which was at least a million more than in June 1941.49
More men and
women were now drawn into the Services and war industry than in the war
of 1914–18. Not only was the total number at the beginning of 1944 some
three to four millions more than at the peak of manpower mobilisation
in 1918, but it also formed a larger proportion of the total
population—thirty-two percent compared with twenty-eight percent. The
actual number of people directly drawn into service was even greater
than the statistics of mobilisation at first sight indicate. For in the
statistical computation two part-time workers counted as one whole-time
person, and there were, at the end of 1943, the equivalent of 750,000
whole-time workers (mostly women) engaged in part-time work.50
There
were also large numbers of men and, above all, women, outside the
registration, foreigners, men and women of sixty-five years of age and
over. In addition, there were a million voluntary workers, mostly
women, whose contribution to the national effort was difficult to
measure, but who

--222--

undoubtedly replace in the national life a large amount of
paid labour.

The supply of manpower for the war was thus greatly expanded, but
the expansion could not go on much longer. The inflow of manpower was
bound to slacken, and the time was bound to arrive when the human
reserves would be exhausted, and industry and the Services would have
to reduce their estimates. The coming of the exhaustion point had been
long foreseen and even dated. In September 1942 the Joint War
Production Staff foresaw in their Report that the time would come when
the essential needs of the Forces for men would have to be met by
cutting the munitions programmes. Although precise estimates of future
industrial needs could not be formed, they showed that between April
1942 and December 1943 the current programmes of the Services and of
war industry would require for their fulfilment another two million men
or women, which was out of all proportion to what could be scraped up
by further measures of mobilisation. They therefore foresaw that the
Service demands might have to be reduced, and that the munitions
industry would have to obtain higher output not from additional bodies
but from higher productivity of the bodies they already employed. In
October, almost before the warning of the Joint War Production Staff
had had time to sink in, the Ministry of Labour's Survey of Manpower
covering the twelve months mid-June 1942 to mid-June 1943 (the first
Manpower Budget in the proper sense of the term) revealed the full
length to which the demand for manpower was outrunning the supply.

With manpower resources exhausted and total employment about to
recede; it was no longer possible for the War Cabinet to plan for
continued and uninterrupted expansion along the entire front of the war
effort. The need for retrenching the demand for manpower was brought
home to the War Cabinet by the Lord President in his report of November
the same year. The Prime Minister had requested him to consider the
labour prospect to the end of 1943 and to lay before the War Cabinet
the issues which emerged from the Ministry of Labour's Survey. His
verdict was that the additional requirements of the Services and of the
munitions industries would be that date approach 2.7 millions or
thereabouts. On the assumption that the remaining reserves of
'unoccupied' women could yield up as much as half a million, and that
'less essential' occupations could be made to give up another half a
million, there would still remain a deficit of well over a million.
Allowing for every possible exaggeration in the demand of the supply
departments (the Lord President put them at 150,000), the gap between
supply and demand still remained perilously near the figure of a
million. The Lord President's conclusion, therefore, was that the
Government must face the fact that manpower

--223--

resources did not match the current programmes. The country could
not at the same time meet the essential needs of the Navy, provide for
an Army of 100 divisions51 and expand the Air
Force to a total of over
600 operation squadrons. The total calls on manpower would have to be
cut and further adjustments be made.

The Lord President and his immediate advisers on manpower problems
based their conclusions on the assumption that if 1944 were to see the
peak of the military effort, and if victory were to be achieved by the
end of that year, the peak of industrial effort and of employment would
have to come in 1943. After 1943 war industry would have to contract in
order to provide men for a final military effort in 1944. The
alternative, i.e. that of continuing to put equal weight into both
sides of the war effort would mean a gradual loss of efficiency in both.52

However unwelcome, the conclusion was not unexpected, for by the
end of 1942 the labour deficit had ceased to be a mere accounting
forecast. Hitherto, it had been possible to provide for excesses of
demand over immediate supply by mobilising additional categories of men
and women, and by contracting still further the less essential fields
of employment. There were now few prospects of fresh supplies from
either source. By the end of 1942 most civilian industries and services
had contracted as far as the maintenance of communal life on these
islands would allow. Indeed in some civilian industries, such as
transport and laundries, it had gone too far, and now that American
forces were arriving in the country these and some other civilian
occupations had to be reinforced with new recruits. Nor could further
measures of registration and mobilisation of women be expected to yield
much result.53 The British
Government, and Mr. Churchill in
particular, had no difficulty in recognising that the limit of British
mobilisation was near.

From the end of 1942 periodical cuts in supply programmes had to
be made and manpower additions had to be doled out at much reduced
rates; additions at some points had to be matched by subtractions at
others. The Prime Minister's first set of proposals for reductions in
the Service and munitions programmes were made very shortly after the
Lord President's report:54 their effects on
labour allocations to the
supply departments are shown in Table 32.

--224--

Manpower allocations to the end of 1943 as
authorised in December 1942

TABLE 32

Thousands

The
demands in July 1942

Cuts

Allocations
authorised

Admiralty (Supply)

186

75

111

Ministry of Supply

148

226

-78

Ministry of Aircraft
Production

603

100

503

TOTAL

937

401

536

The requirements were thus drastically cut, and the Ministry of
Supply was for the first time asked to reduce its total labour force,
but the demands of the bomber programmes55 and
of naval
construction56 were still
sufficiently insistent to received between
them an additional allocation of some 614,000 workers by the end of
1943. The position did not materially change in the course of that
year. When in the spring of 1943 the Ministry of Labour presented an
interim survey of manpower, the labour intake of the supply departments
was still increasing. The Ministry of Aircraft Production may not have
been getting all the workers to which it was entitled, but the Ministry
of Supply had not yet succeeded in reducing its labour force and was
still adding to its establishment. The survey was followed by further
endeavours to bring down the manpower 'targets' of the Services and of
the supply departments. The extent to which labour demands had been
exaggerated had by now become apparent, and cuts could be
correspondingly more severe. Table 33 shows the
numbers to be allotted
to the supply departments by the end of the year under the revised
allocations of July 1943.

Manpower allocations to the end of 1943 as
revised in July 1943

TABLE 33

Thousands

Allocations
of December 1942

Revised
allocations of July 1943

Admiralty (Supply)

111

111

Ministry of Supply

-78

-165

Ministry of Aircraft
Production

503

259

TOTAL

536

205

--225--

Thus, on paper at least, the additional supply of labour to war
industry was reduced to little more than 200,000. Yet when the 1943
Manpower Survey appeared in the autumn of that year it revealed new and
still higher demands for 1944. The total requirement for additional men
and women for the Services and industry came to 1,190,000.57
In
December 1943 the three supply departments tabled urgent demands for at
least 114,000 men and women in addition to the numbers they employed at
that time.58 The Ministry of Supply
needed an addition 31,000, the
Admiralty 71,000, the Ministry of Aircraft Production 12,000, and the
other branches of production participating in the preparation for the
invasion claimed another 6,000.

The full incidence of these demands will be realised if it is
remembered that under the previous cuts, those of December 1942 and
July 1943, the planned size of the armed forces had to be curtailed to
relieve pressure on manpower. The reductions had involved a cut of four
divisions in the planned strength of the Army, of fifty-seven squadrons
in the R.A.F.'s programme for 1943 and of eighty-nine squadrons in the
programme to the end of June 1944. In addition, owing to the cut in the
labour intake of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, a loss of
fourteen heavy bomber squadrons in 1943 and of nineteen heavy bomber
squadrons by mid-1944 was expected. No such further cuts were possible
at the beginning of 1944 when preparations for final battle were in
hand. At the same time natural wastage alone, not counting battle
casualties, was expected to reduce in the course of the year the total
number of employed population in the country by 150,000.

Hence the continued endeavours of the Government to prune the
supply programmes. Hence also the continuous regimen of stringent
though shifting priorities. Of the three supply departments, the
Ministry of Aircraft Production had enjoyed at the turn of 1941 and
1942 the first claim on resources, mainly by virtue of its
all-important bomber programme. In April 1942, however, the War Cabinet
approved a high programme of naval construction to deal with the
mounting attacks on shipping, and no sooner had this urgency passed
away than the need for landing-craft became acute. From May 1942 the
Admiralty accordingly acquired the highest priority for important items
of its programmes, a priority which it continued to enjoy until the
preparations for D-Day began to overshadow all other military
objectives. In the final months of preparation the bomber had again to
be singled out for preferential treatment, and so also were the special
offensive projects on which the Ministry of Supply were engaged. Since
the middle of 1942 that Ministry had been cutting its programmes and
its manpower in order to facilitate the general reducations

--226--

in war industry, and also in order to make possible continued
additions to labour in the Ministries enjoying higher priority. Now the
emphasis shifted to it again. In the summer of 1944 the needs of the
British armies on the Continent reacted again on its programmes, and
the Ministry of Supply had to be allowed to add somewhat to its labour
force in spite of the far-reaching cuts which had by then been
introduced into the munitions industry as a whole (see Table 34).

Manpower
allocations for 1944

TABLE 34

Thousands

Original
demands

Allocations
of December 1943

Revised
allocations: September 1944

Admiralty (Supply)

71

-13

-68

Ministry of Supply

31

-220

-170

Ministry of Aircraft
Production

12

-69

-198

TOTAL

114

-302

-436

The actual emphasis of war production shifted even more frequently
and irregularly than the alternating priorities of the three supply
departments indicated, for within each of the three main programmes the
weight attaching to individual weapons and stores rose and fell with
military events. These changed will be recounted in somewhat greater
detail further on;59 but they must be borne
in mind in tracing the
course which the war economy was compelled to take under the double
compulsion of expanding requirements and diminishing resources. The
progress of war production had to be 're-tailored', hemmed in at some
point, released at others, in accordance with the changing emphasis of
strategic necessity and with the dwindling reserves of productive
resources. But even thus 're-tailored' it might not have been
sufficient to meet the most essential requirements of British forces
without much greater American assistance.

(4)

The American Munitions

(a)
THE NEW NEED

New importance now attached to American supplies. A history of
British war production may not, of course, be the right place in which
to tell the story of American supplies in all its aspects. But the two
themes were closely interwoven, and the weave got closer as the war

--227--

was approaching its end. If in the earlier period, i.e. before the
middle of the end of 1941, British expectations of 'finished' munitions
were not greatly dependent upon the output of American factories, by
1942 and thereafter they had more and more to be adjusted to what could
or could not be obtained from the United States. With its economic
resources engaged to the full Britain found herself unable to meet the
additional demands for munitions in the same proportion as before. As
it was, some cuts in individual programmes had to be made. It was only
the rising scale of American assistance that prevented the cuts from
being still greater. Without it most essential preparations for the
offensive employment of the British forces and for their needs in the
field of battle would have had to be sacrificed; indeed the whole
problem of Britain's war effort and the scale of her combatant action
would have had to be radically recast. By 1944 reliance on American
supplies went so far as to enforce what amounted to a division of
labour between the war industries in the two countries. But long before
then the American supplies figured so prominently in British
calculations that the size and the character of the home-produced
deliveries could not be understood without taking note of what had come
to be expected and in fact was being received from the United States.

(b)
SELF-SUFFICIENCY

It has already been explained that in the early stages of the war
the
British war effort was more or less self-sufficient. The size of the
British forces, the scale of British war production, the pace of
rearmament and presumably the scale of military preparations were for
the time being determined by the manpower and economic resources
directly available to the United Kingdom. Britain had been producing at
home the bulk of her weapons and building up her Forces to an
establishment capable of being supplied out of domestic production.
This does not of course mean that the British Government was making a
deliberate choice between alternative plans resting on a statistical
military argument. Its general attitude was much more opportunist and
less articulate than that. While American support was uncertain and the
British resources not yet fully taken up, there appeared to be no other
way of planning the war effort than by taking the self-sufficiency of
the war effort more or less for granted. Not until the American
alliance had become a reality and British manpower was on the point of
being fully mobilised did it become necessary or possible to conceive a
different distribution of resources.

The assumption of self-sufficiency was of course from the outset
tempered by a number of factors which did not directly concern British
relations with the United States. From the very beginning of

--228--

the war Canada, a member of the Commonwealth, figured in
British calculations of combatant strength as well as in British
programmes of supplies. At first she may not have figured very largely.
Half-hearted attempts had been made before the war to prepare the
ground for munitions production in Canada, but apart from a modest
aircraft programme the only significant results had been small orders
for Bren guns and field artillery. The 1st Canadian Division was
equipped almost entirely in the United Kingdom. Nor was the position
much altered by the outbreak of war. Doubts about the ability of
Canadian industry to deliver the goods quickly and shortage of dollars
combined to keep the British munitions programme in Canada before
Dunkirk within very narrow bounds—ten corvettes, small quantities of
gun barrels, ammunition and explosives, and capacity for an eventual
output of 250 aircraft a month, mostly trainers. Even so, up to June
1940 a more important role in the supply of munitions, other than
aircraft, was allotted to Canada than to the United States.

These assumptions, however, were bound to be influenced by the
growing
numbers of overseas troops to be armed. Whereas the planned
establishment of the field army to be raised at home seldom exceeded
the equivalent of fifty divisions, Britain's responsibility for arming
and equipping troops under her command had by the end of 1942 extended
to a large number of allied and colonial divisions (at one time that
accretion was expected to reach the equivalent of more than
seventy-five divisions).60 The rough and ready
assumption of
self-sufficiency which may have underlain the planned distribution of
resources in 1939 was obviously untenable in the conditions of swollen
liabilities of 1942.

The demands on American supplies—not only their size but their
very raison d'être—changed
accordingly.61 To begin with they
were very modest, and their modesty
reflected not only the scale of the war as it was conceived in Britain
but also a number of factors more specifically American. Most important
of all was the difficulty of payment. As long as the rule of 'cash and
carry' applied, dollar payments in the United States were severely
rationed; and the total ration, in itself small, was in its turn mainly
given over to non-munitions goods—food, raw materials and machine
tools. Dependence on American and Canadian raw materials was great and
it grew greater as the war advanced. Dependence on American machine
tools was never again to be as great as it had been in the years 1939
to 1941:62 the time when the main
network of British war

--229--

factories was being equipped. So even if American industry
had been capable of delivering large quantities of munitions (it will
be shown presently that with the possible exception of aircraft
American output was as yet small even by British standards)63
the
dollar ration would not have allowed them to be bought in any quantity.

From this point of view the situation changed in the summer of
1940.
With the dreadful prospect of defeat and invasion so near there was no
sense in keeping within the limits of the dollar allocation calculated
on a three-year basis. There was in any case no question of Mr.
Churchill's Government doing so; and one of the first manifestations
of the 'reckless abandon' with which the war was now to be waged was
the decision no longer to refrain from ordering American supplies
through lack of dollars.

The decision had an immediate effect on the scale of British
purchases
from the United States; yet it made little difference to the 'make-up'
of British requirements. The need for American raw materials and
machine tools was even greater after Dunkirk than it had been before.
When on the morrow of Dunkirk there occurred the chance of acquiring
the large quantities of machine tools ordered in the United States by
the French, it was eagerly seized by the supply departments, and
indeed the initiative came from the Ministry of Supply. The need for
American machine tools was acutely felt all through 19841, and the
demand for special-purpose tools of American make and design remained
high and unsatisfied to the very end of the war.64
As for raw
materials, the expanding output of munitions, the loss of several
European sources of raw materials and the mounting difficulty of
shipping continued to raise the volume of raw materials obtained from
the United States.

On the other hand, the flow of munitions across the Atlantic was
for
the time being bound to be scanty; and it was so made up as to leave
little scope for the purchase of standard weapons in common use and
least of all for the army weapons in the Ministry of Supply programmes.
The main claim of American supplies was from the outset conceded to the
R.A.F. The United States possessed in peacetime a substantial aircraft
industry, and the early British orders for aircraft could therefore be
cast on a larger scale and stood a better chance of early
delivery than those of the other Services. In mid-summer 1940 while the
Battle of Britain was being fought Lord Beaverbrook made it clear that
in addition to current contracts he would be prepared to take all the
aircraft which could be produced up to 3,000 a month. The figure was of
course hyperbolic: in spite of the rising rate of deliveries, the
average monthly exports of American

--230--

aircraft in the second half of 1941 ran at about 270.65
But in general Lord Beaverbrook was as good as his word and throughout
1940 and 1941 pressed for as many aircraft as America could possibly
yield, thereby greatly outweighing the volume and the value of American
supplies to the other Services.

By comparison, the volume and value of what the Navy and Army
received
from the United States in 1940–41 (not counting the weapons from old
stocks which the President dispatched in the summer of 1940 or the old
destroyers ceded later in the year) was exceedingly small. The total
value of Admiralty contracts at the height of the naval crisis of
1940–41 stood at about £33 millions; they included orders for
munitions amounting to about £20 millions, for engines including
motor-boat engines to about £9 millions and for small vessels,
other than warships, and motor boats for about £600,000. With the
exception of small ships, no naval vessels properly speaking were to be
ordered from the United States until the middle of 1941. The main
demand was for merchant vessels, for even the authors of the pre-war
plans had assumed that the Merchant Navy would have to draw on American
shipbuilding resources. Yet the first Kaiser-Todd contract for Liberty
ships—sixty in all—was not concluded until December 1940; the great
Kaiser organisation for prefabricated shipbuilding was not set going
until the spring of 1941, and the first Kaiser ships were not launched
for at least another six months.

The Ministry of Supply orders were almost entirely confined to
so-called 'deficiencies', i.e. urgent items which British industry
could not for the time being supply in sufficient numbers, and to
so-called 'insurance' orders against possible losses in output through
bombing or other causes. Even at their highest the deficiencies did not
form a large proportion of the British programmes. On occasions the
Ministry of Supply were anxious to get from the United States
relatively large quantities of certain exceptional weapons. This in
August 1940 the Ministry of Supply were anxious to get from the United
States relatively large quantities of certain exceptional weapons. Thus
in August 1940 the Ministry of Supply authorised the placing of
contracts in the United States for 3,000 cruiser tanks, about thirty
percent of total tank requirements. The list of deficiencies which in
September 1940 Sir Walter Layton, as he then was, took with him to
Washington included 1,600 heavy anti-aircraft guns, or just over thirty
percent of the total requirements;66
1,800 field guns, nearly thirty
percent of requirements and 1,250 anti-tank guns, twelve percent of
requirements. The other deficiencies on his list were less than ten
percent of requirements and most of the Ministry

--231--

of Supply's stores were not on the list at all. A rough
computation of the total deficiencies then list represented rather less
than five percent of the Ministry's current programmes at Z + 27 (30th
November 1941) measured by values. Even this estimate exaggerated the
real need, for the deficiencies were computed on the assumption that
the initial equipment of the Army would have to be completed by the end
of 1941. Had a later and more realistic date been chosen the figures of
deficiencies would have been put still lower.

Insurance orders were calculated on a scale which appeared to be
but
was not more ambitious. When an 'Army Insurance Policy' was worked out
in June/July 1940 the margin to be insured was reckoned at twenty to
thirty-five percent of the total requirements of the more important
military stores. Nevertheless the total orders which the Ministry of
Supply placed in the United States during 1940 and 1941 covering both
'deficiencies' and 'insurance' were well below fifteen percent of the
British programmes, and actual deliveries were lower still. A later
estimate put the British purchases of 'finished' munitions in the
United States from September 1939 to the end of 1940 at rather less
than $515 millions or about 5.6 percent of the total British Empire
supplies of munitions from all sources; and yet this figure included
the greatly increased outlay on ships, aircraft and weapons which
followed the military events of the early summer. According to the same
computation the value of munitions obtained from American in 1941 was
not more than $1,490 millions or 11.5 percent of the supplies of all
sources; and that in spite of the coming of Lend-Lease in the spring of
that year.67

The low levels were a matter of both choice and necessity. In the
Admiralty and more still in the Ministry of Supply a doctrine of
self-sufficiency prevailed, and neither department appeared to be
willing to run the risks of an alternative policy. The alternative did
not of course remain unformulated. Throughout 1940 and 1941 some of the
leading British representatives in the United States, men like Mr.
Purvis, M. Monnet, and Sir Arthur Salter, then chairman of the North
American Supplies Committee in London, repeatedly criticised British
policy in matters of supply as not sufficiently imaginative or
audacious. The war could not be won as long as the Americans were
merely asked to make good the worst deficiencies in the existing
British programmes or to cover modest insurance margins. For one thing
the British programmes, drawn up as they were to the scale of British
resources, were far below the German war potential and therefore
insufficient to ensure final victory. In order to make victory certain
it was necessary to launch a single Anglo-American programme of
production large enough to outstrip the potential output

--232--

of German Europe and, therefore, large enough to engage the
entire economic strength of the United States.68

This was the Purvis-Monnet-Salter argument. In the long run, i.e.
in
the closing years of the war, events appeared to vindicate it, for
Britain's dependence on American industry became very great. But in
1940, when the argument was first formulated, the policy of the great
industrial alliance was still little more than hope. It made occasional
and somewhat unsubstantial appearances among the more distant
objectives of British strategy, and on one or two occasions in 1940 and
early 1941 it entered into the Prime Minister's communications to the
President. It was also adopted by Sir Walter Layton as a directive for
his negotiations in the United States in September 1940. He did not,
however, press it very hard during the negotiations and would not have
been fully supported by his own department if he had. For it
necessitated a number of assumptions and hopes which in the London of
1940 and 1941 did not appear at all certain.

The grounds of uncertainty were several. To begin with, there was
the
uncertainty (which the supply departments themselves were in no
position to weigh and measure) whether the United States would remain
neutral or become involved in the war. If they did become involved in
the war, it was uncertain how much of their munitions output they would
retain for their own armed forces (whose size was quite beyond
prediction): the munitions assignment system, which the event assured
to the United Kingdom a substantial proportion of American production,
was still a thing of the future. The 'targets' of American production
were, as yet, a matter of aspiration or, for some, of faith; in 1940
British supply departments had no firm ground for believing that
American industry would in fact achieve the vast output of which
theoretically it was capable. The American shipbuilding industry had
not yet fully emerged from the great inter-war slump and was expanding
very slowly. In 1940, the second year of war expansion, it was still
unable to turn out more than fifty-three ocean-going ships, and in 1939
little more than half that number had been built. No medium of heavy
tanks were produced in the United States in 1939 or 1940; and in 1941,
with an output of 3,900 medium and heavy tanks, American production was
still only twenty percent below the corresponding figure of British
output. The number of guns of 2-pounder and above produced in the
United States in 1940 was 340, and in 1941 6,720—about thirty to forty
percent of the corresponding figure of British output in that year.
Until the very end of the first quarter of 1942 the volume of American
output of munitions as a whole was below that of British production.

--233--

There were also persistent doubts about American designs
and specifications. The bulk of American munitions was intended for
American forces and was made to their own orders and design and
appeared unsuited to British requirements. The orders placed in the
United States including those for 'insurance' were therefore for
British types. The American Army authorities on their part disliked
orders which might divert resources to the production of weapons which
the American forces did not use. In the summer of 1940 the British
representatives tried to persuade the American soldiers to adopt for
their own use some of the British types of weapons. Travelling teams of
British experts demonstrated, or believed they demonstrated, the
ability of the British 25-pounder and 3.7-inch anti-aircraft gun to
outshoot the corresponding American weapons. But the American Army
authorities remained unconverted, and their Government continued to
classify weapons of British type as 'non-common' stores. With the
battle of the types thus lost, the Ministry of Supply gave up such
little hopes as it may have had of covering a large proportion of its
needs from the output which the Americans were developing for their own
Army.

This must not be taken to mean that no weapons of American types
were
ordered .Thus American-designed tanks were asked for and supplied from
the end of 1940 onwards; and on one or two occasions in 1940 and 1941
the British Government placed large and spectacular orders for weapons
of American type. In October 1940 Sir Walter Layton, urged on by the
Prime Minister, accepted—and perhaps even instigated—the officer of the
American authorities to supply American-type munitions sufficient to
equip ten divisions. This ten-division programme also figured
prominently as 'List B' in the negotiations with the United States
throughout 1941. The significance of this order must not, however, be
misunderstood. At the time of the ordering there was a possibility of
arming with American-designed weapons some Empire contingents in
outlying theatres of war, but the real object of the offer, understood
by the British, was to use British orders to develop American capacity
for the production of weapons. American Army authorities needed that
capacity, and the weapons produced under the ten-division order were
eventually diverted to the American Army in 1942.

When, after Dunkirk, the British Government turned its eyes across
the
Atlantic, it was, of course, looking for help from the Dominion of
Canada as well as from the still neutral United States. The arguments
which made for restraint in the ordering of American munitions applied
with much less force to Canada. There was no 'battle of the types', for
Canadian forces were equipped with British weapons and the Canadians
were generally content to follow the British lead in design. There was
less fear of the 'vagaries of allocation':

--234--

Canada had defence needs of her own, but they did not constitute a
serious threat to the delivery of munitions on British accounts. There
was a problem of payment, but it was never allowed to impede the flow
of war material. Thus, while progress in the United States was held up
by long-drawn-out financial, technical and political negotiations, the
Canadians went ahead to build up an armaments industry, the greater
part of which was directly at British service. One-third of the
original Army 'insurance' programme was allotted to them and as time
went on their share became steadily larger. Canadian-built escort
vessels played a great part in the Battle of the Atlantic; most of the
Eighth Army's transport came from Canada; Canadian factories
contributed more than those of the United States to British supplies of
anti-aircraft guns and the lighter varieties of armoured fighting
vehicles. On the other hand the industrial resources of Canada were
very much smaller than those of the United States, and in the nature of
things Canadian munitions production could never reach sufficient
volume, least of all in the crucial categories of tanks and aircraft,
to alter the basic assumptions of British war production planning.

For all these reasons the supply departments, and in the first
place the Ministry of Supply, went on assuming that the whole or nearly
the whole burden of military requirements would have to be borne by
British war industry; and for the time being it was so borne. National
resources were not yet fully mobilised, the armed forces and war
industry were still capable of simultaneous expansion; and as long as
this situation lasted the limited certainties of domestic output could
still appear preferable to the unlimited but uncertain potentialities
of American production and allocation. Indeed, granted the
determination to remain independent of American output, there was even
some ground for fearing that America's war industry might attempt too
much. As long as the progress of British war production depended on
American machine tools and raw materials, there was some reason for
fearing lest American expansion should become too great as to absorb
the raw materials and the tools which British industry badly needed. As
early as mid-1940 Lord Beaverbrook's high appetite for aeroplanes had
to be satisfied by sacrificing to American manufacturers some of the
French machine tools acquired after the fall of France.69
Throughout
late 1940 and 1941 the supply of machine tools for Britain suffered
from the overwhelming requirements of the American munitions industry;
and it has already been shown that the immense plans on the morrow of
Pearl Harbor created a sudden stringency in the supply of critical raw
materials.70

--235--

(c)
TOWARDS A MERGER

The supplies of munitions from the United States, their volume,
their
importance to the British war effort, and indeed the entire policy
behind them, were to change in later years. From the British point of
view the decisive factor was to be the growing shortage of manpower,
but the mutual involvement of the British and American production
programmes had begun some time before the labour shortage in Britain
became pressing. The road towards it was opened by the passing of the
Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, even though progress along it was not
very rapid for a while. The general effect of the new financial
dispensation on supplies of munitions was bound to be gradual. The
dollar value of lend-lease supplies actually received during the
remainder of 1941 was estimated at £1,082 millions, about
one-seventh of the annual average for the next four years;71
and the
bulk of the allocation under lend-lease continued as before to be
devoted to food and raw materials. If anything, this country put an
even greater reliance on American supplies of raw materials than
before, for Britain was now able to switch to the United States her
purchases of raw materials without fear of exhausting the stocks of
dollars. After Pearl Harbor strategic needs led to further switches to
the United States, and considerations of shipping economy continued to
influence the British import policy in the same direction. To save
shipping space and labour Britain also began to buy from America larger
quantities of semi-finished industrial products—mild steel instead of
iron ore, non-ferrous metals in semi-manufactured condition, crude
chemicals.

On the other hand some time had to pass before finished munitions
began
to come through under the Lend-Lease Act in large quantities. For not
only had the American industry not yet reached its high level of
production, but weapons immediately available were still those produced
to British cash orders. Of the 2,400 aircraft exported between the
passing of the Act and the end of the year, 2,300 had been ordered by
March 1941 and paid for in cash. The same is true of 165 out of 951
tanks supplied in the same period, and of 8,000 out of 13,000
lorries.72 It was not until the
second quarter of 1942 that the bulk
of munitions accruing to this country and to the other 'British'
theatres of war had been appropriated under the Lend-Lease Act.

The sluggish progress of American supplies to Britain was
nevertheless
deceptive. While exports of munitions still seemed to grow very slowly,
if at all, determined attempts were made on both sides of the Atlantic
to lift American assistance above its pre-lend-lease levels. The needs
of the British Navy and Army still continued to be

--236--

expressed as 'deficiencies' and 'insurance margins'. But
the actual quantities were becoming so great as to involve the main
strength of American industry; until the time came when the whole
strategic assumptions of the British and American supply programmes had
to be adjusted to the conditions of full mobilisation in Britain and
the approaching offensive on the Continent.

The first important step in this direction was more symbolic than
practical, and moreover appeared to outpace opinion in London. It was
connected with the 'Purvis Balance Sheet',73
compiled with the avowed
object of enabling the United States Government to estimate the dollar
appropriations which might be necessary to cover the total British
requirements under the projected Lend-Lease Bill. It was to be used as
a basis for British claims under the new American methods of allocating
their output. In form at least the 'balance sheet' was so arranged to
to
imply that the United States would not be expected to do more than
cover the deficiencies in the existing British programmes. But the
programmes themselves were stated in terms so broad and so generous
that, had the Americans accepted them, they would have found themselves
charged with the provision of a very large part of British
requirements. The demands on America listed in the 'balance sheet',
included some 7,000 tanks, some 3,300 field guns, some 23,000 tank and
anti-tank guns, some 9,000 anti-aircraft guns and some 86 million
shells, all to be delivered before the end of 1942.

The figures turned out to be in advance of opinion at home. One of
their main objects was to demonstrate to the American authorities and
the American public the true scale of military needs. To the extent
they were a contribution to America's own plans of rearmament; and by
all appearances they played their part in educating American opinion
and may even have helped the President to carry through is vast
programmes of munitions. This purpose, however, appeared irrelevant to
the immediate preoccupation of the supply departments at home, which
took the figures at their face value. And taken at their face value
they appeared too ambitious. Above all, the Ministry of Supply was not
prepared to involve itself with American industry to the extent
envisaged in the 'balance sheet'. In the words of the Ministry of
Supply telegram to Washington it desired

to make clear that the statement provided to
Purvis was a rough
estimate based on many broad assumptions for the main purpose of
dramatisation of a situation and was never intended to be used as a
precise programme or as a basis for contract action …. So far as
military requirements were concerned … we should not at this stage
regard provision on so high a scale as justified ….

--237--

As a broad indication, the Ministry of Supply suggested
that the requirements for the main army equipments for 1942 should be
discounted by fifteen percent; for ammunition items the discount should
be substantially higher. In the end the British Supply Council74
itself explained that the figures were not intended to form a basis for
immediate orders and were only designed as the first bid in the
anticipated haggle over the allocation of American production.

A still more ambitious attempt at unified production plans was to
be
made some six months later in connection with the so-called Victory
Programme of September and October 1941. By the summer of that year
Anglo-American relations had reached a state of intimacy in which
victory over German could be officially acknowledged as a joint concern
of the two nations. Though still non-belligerent, the United States
Government was now fully prepared to accept the duty of providing
Britain with the tools necessary to finish the job. As the United
States Government had also undertaken to participate in supplies to
Russia, the time became ripe for a survey of the responsibilities now
shared between the two countries and for some sort of a 'Victory
Programme'.75

The principle of a 'Victory Programme' had been urged by various
persons throughout 1940 and the first part of 1941. but the issue came
to a head in the late summer of 1941. In July the Prime Minister,
acting on the request of the Chiefs of Staff, asked the President to
arrange a joint study for a combined strategy for winning the war.
Independently of this move Mr. Stimson sent to this country in August
1941 a representative, Mr. Stacy May, to explore the munitions problem.
Mr. May's principal concern was the scale of American war industry. In
his words 'he felt strongly, and others in high positions in America
felt the same, that the present schedule was much too low'. He
therefore hoped to obtain an indication of 'ultimate requirements' in
order to 'jolt the American production men'.

The figures which Mr. May was able to take back to Washington were
very
tentative, but they were sufficiently high to strengthen the case for a
joint survey of victory requirements. Before long preparations for a
victory conferences were put in hand on both sides of the Atlantic.
Early in September the President asked the American Chiefs of Staff to
make an estimate of the armament production

--238--

required for victory in the war, and requested that the
information should be available for the forthcoming conference in
London. At about the same time the British Government formulated the
general strategic assumptions and assembled from the Service and supply
ministries their 'production requirements for victory', covering the
period between 1st July 1941 and the end of March 1943. These schedules
showed increases in most stores, and were indeed so high that they
could not possibly be met except by American assistance far greater
than had ever been contemplated before. The figures for army weapons
finally submitted to the conference were as shown in Table 35.

United
Kingdom requirements of army weapons as
submitted to the Victory Conference, September 1941

TABLE 35

Required
from the United States
(Units)

Percentage
of total British requirements
%

Tanks

11,500

41

Medium artillery

700

47

Heavy artillery

100

33

Anti-tank guns (6-pdr.
and over)

4,000

36

Anti-aircraft guns
(light)

1,700

14

Anti-aircraft guns
(heavy)

3,400

47

Rifles

1,650,000

60

The conference met on 15th September and the British requirements
submitted to it reflected the hopeful mood which had by then come to
pervade relations between Britain and the United States. The decisions
of the conference were not, however, capable of being translated into
immediate orders or assignments. In the early autumn of 1941 future
American action in fields both military and diplomatic was as yet too
uncertain to provide clear guidance of military requirements. In the
absence of American data, all the conference could do was to survey the
general strategic situation and to register the British requirements
for the period between July 1941 and June 1943. The only definite
decision was about supplies to Russia, and for at time it even looked
as if supplies to Britain would have to be slightly reduced in the
immediate future in order to allow their diversion to the Russians. The
more distant British requirements were apparently accepted without much
questioning, but also without any definite confirmation. They were to
be subjected to further study in Washington where they were to be
correlated with the new production plans and with the requirements of
the American Army if and when the latter were fixed. But long before
that point

--239--

arrived the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the United States
entered the war.

The merge was bound to become more real after America's entry into
the war. The institutions necessary to give it effect were in fact
founded without delay. The Conference of Allied Leaders held in
Washington from December 1941 to January 1942 decided to set up a
number of agencies to serve the common purpose of the Allies. The
Combined Chiefs of Staff were to be charged with the discussion and the
working out of common strategic plans; a Combined Raw Materials Board
was to plan the development, expansion and use of the raw materials
required for the combined war effort. But from the point of view of
this study, the most important of the new committees was to be the
Combined Munitions Assignment Board to operate under the Combined
Chiefs of Staff as the chief agency for the allocation of weapons, in
accordance with strategic priorities.76 For
purposes of allocation the
entire munitions resources of the two countries 'were deemed to be in a
common pool'.

For the time being, however, both the pool and the machinery
devised for drawing supplies from it were still little more than
projects. The combined strategic plans were not yet there, nor were the
munitions to serve them; even the blue-prints of institutions were
still incomplete. For if the industrial efforts of the two countries
were to serve a common strategy and to feed a common pool, industrial
plans had to be coordinated as intimately as strategic plans. A body
responsible for some such coordination was in the minds of the British
representatives at the Washington conference, but it was not to be
established for another six months—on the occasion of Mr. Oliver
Lyttelton's visit to the United States in the spring of 1942.

The visit, its purpose and achievements, revealed the distance
which still separated the plans of combined war production from its
reality. In the months immediately following Pearl Harbor hopes of
coordination ran high, but the immediate allocation of raw materials
and munitions to Britain was greatly jeopardised by the direct
repercussions of America's entry into the war. The requirements of the
Ministry of Supply in particular stood in great danger of being
jettisoned to make room for the demands of the American Services and,
to some extent, for the urgent British calls for ships and aircraft.
This very danger, however, proved the necessity of completing and
carrying into effect the Washington decisions of the previous winter.
So, although the immediate pretext of Mr. Lyttelton's visit was to war
off the cuts in British supplies, the preliminary discussion in London
and the subsequent conversations in Washington inevitably raised the
more permanent problem. In order to place

--240--

British requirements on a stable and rational basis it was
necessary to relate them to common strategic objects; and that meant
concerting not only strategic plans but also production plans.

In this Mr. Lyttelton succeeded fully in form and not quite so
fully in substance. A joint organisation for supply came into existence
similar and parallel to the joint machinery of military staffs already
in existence—a Combined Production and Resources Board (C.P.R.B.) with
Mr. Donald Nelson77 as the United States'
representative and Mr.
Lyttelton as the representative of the United Kingdom. A body was thus
created for working out a unified plan of production based on a common
strategic hypothesis. The plan itself, however, was not yet there. On
the British side every preparation was made: the Chiefs of Staff had
worked out an Order of Battle for April 1943 to serve as a basis for
joint production plans, and the supply ministries submitted estimates
of their total requirements. On the American side. however,
preparations were not yet equally advanced. In spite of their general
willingness to relate production to joint strategy, the American
Service
Chiefs were not yet prepared to subject their requirements to a test of
comparative strategic urgency side by side with the British needs. In
these circumstances all the British negotiators could hope to achieve
was to place the British requirements on the same plan of urgency as
the corresponding American requirements. At the first meeting of the
C.P.R.B. on 20th June a general decision was taken that 'priority
ratings should be allotted to those items of equipment equivalent to
the United States' weapons for Forces of equivalent strategic
importance'. In accordance with this decision the most urgent British
requirements for stores like 3.7-inch predictors, rifles, tank
transports, 10-ton lorries, universal carriers, tank components and
explosives were to be given the highest priority to the extent of about
half the quantities asked for.

Mr Lyttelton's next visit led to further acts of 'mutual
interference'. In the late autumn of 1942 he had to travel again to
Washington, and the pretext as before was provided by the danger of
reduced allocations to Britain as a result of threatened reductions in
American war production plans. By the early autumn of that year it had
become clear that American ambitions in the industrial field were
over-inflated and would have to contract. Whereas the original
objective for 1943 had been $97.9 billions, the War Production Board
now came to the conclusion that production in 1943 would probably be
somewhere about $75 billions. In this event it looked as

--241--

if Britain would receive during 1941 not much more than sixty
percent of what the British authorities had been lead to expect. What
is more, the cuts which America at first proposed bore little relation
to the balance of strategic needs in this country. There was no
objection to the American proposals to increase the target for
operational aircraft from 80,000 to 100,000 and to cut the tank
programme by forty percent. But the Americans also proposed to reduce
the 'target' for merchant ships in 1943 from 20 million deadweight tons
to 16 million, and there was a feeling in this country that with the
Battle of the Atlantic at its height the shipping effort would have to
be redoubled.78

These were all urgent and crying needs; yet the real issue went
further than the immediate threat to British supplies or the detailed
composition of American programme. More than ever before, the future of
the war appeared to depend on a thorough unification of the strategic
and economic plans of the two countries. British representatives
believed that under any unified plan of strategy and production the
needs of British forces in the various theatres of war would be met
more fully than they in fact were in the face of the competing claims
of American forces. And, overriding these eminently practical
considerations, a fundamental principle of the British war effort for
the first time revealed itself for what it was—an essentially
Anglo-American problem. This country was now anxious to discuss the
entire distribution of its own resources between the fighting Services
and war production in relation to American supplies.

The argument was well summarised in a communication from the
Minister of Production to the Prime Minister. He reminded the Prime
Minister that changes of American plans played havoc with British plans,

… as we must allocate almost all the remaining
reserves of our manpower
within the next few months, we must reach some understanding with the
Americans. Without such an understanding, we cannot risk increasing the
manpower in the Services on a scale involving substantial dependence on
the United States for equipment. If we cannot reach it we must adjust
the balance between our industrial effort and the intake into the
Services. This would mean, in fact, that, given the need for expansion
both of the naval and air production programmes, there must be a
limitation on the size of the Army.

In this way the threatened exhaustion of the labour reserves
brought to the surface the latent issue of an Anglo-American 'division

--242--

of labour. It has already been stressed that hitherto the issue
had not presented itself as a clear-cut dilemma. But by the autumn of
1942 Mr. Churchill's Government was about to take far-reaching
decisions on the size of the armed forces and of the munitions
industries, and the choice of possibilities was clearly dependent upon
the scale of American assistance. Mr. Churchill was of course
determined to trim excessive ambition of the Services, and especially
of the Army, but the planned strength of the Forces, even after
trimming, was greater than British war industry alone could supply. It
now became clear that, left to her own production, Britain would be
compelled to make drastic reductions in her combatant forces and thus
to resign herself to a much smaller part in the coming battle than all
previous plans assigned to her. This Mr. Churchill and his Government
would not willingly do. What they therefore hoped for and expected was
that from now on American war industry would be able to cover a large
part of the British Service programmes and, above all, to meet the
needs for new or unusual weapons for which capacity in this country was
not available and for which new capacity could not be created or manned.

These were the issues which underlay approaches to the United
States in the autumn of 1942 and the subsequent negotiations in
Washington. What this country now wanted and badly needed was a true
pool of munitions, and within a year or so of Mr. Lyttelton's second
visit that pooling was to all intents and purposes achieved.

(d)
A COMMON POOL

It was very fortunate that at the turn of 1942–43, i.e. at the
time when shortage of manpower compelled this country to place on
American the main weight of the additional demands for munitions, most
of the other arguments against this course should also have gone. In
spite of their magnitude and generosity the American assignments of
munitions under lend-lease procedure could still at times be subjects
to strong pressures from their own Services. As a rule the pressures
sprang from motives wholly legitimate, for they had the interests of
common victory in view. They were, however, something the British
Government was unable to control, and they were therefore from the
British point of view unmanageable and unaccountable. To that extent
people still found it possible in 1942 to speak of the 'vagaries' of
American allocations. But in later years this note was sounded very
rarely, for, the 'vagaries' notwithstanding, the volume of munitions
assigned and delivered to British forces grew very fast.

Generally speaking, such scepticism as still lingered about the
potential volume of American supplies had by 1943 all but evaporated.
The very reasons which earlier in the war delayed the full

--243--

deployment of American production resources now led to a
remarkable outburst of industrial activity. The Americans, not yet
confronted with direct demands from the field of battle, were able to
draw on the habits of their pre-war economy and to tackle the problem
of wartime production and methods of mass production.79
Mass
production required elaborate and extensive tooling up of war plants,
and while it lasted the immediate output was bound to be meagre; but
once completed it produced a veritable flood of munitions. In the
second quarter of 1942 the American output caught up the British; by
early autumn the weighted average of American output was more than
twice that of British munitions; airframe weight was twice, army
weapons two and three-quarter times, merchant shipping nearly six times
as great as the corresponding British production. And yet American war
industry was less than halfway towards its targets and employed less
than seven million people, compared with the British 5.1 millions. The
productivity of labour was already estimated to be seventy percent
higher than in Britain and promised to be 140 percent higher in the
first quarter of 1943. Thereafter the total output was to grow even
faster. By the end of 1943 it was about four times that of Great
Britain, and the ratio in 1944 approached 6 to 1.

This remarkable expansion of output was not accompanied by that
lack of
pliability which some of the sceptics had prophesied. One objection to
the adoption of mass-production methods in British war industry was the
fear that lines of production elaborately tooled up would be very
difficult to adapt to the continuous evolution of military needs and
that the quality of weapons would suffer. But American factories did
not appear to be afflicted with rigidities of standardised production
to the extent sometimes foretold in this country. They were helped by
their great experience in designed and equipping industrial layouts, by
the great capacities of their machine-tool industry, and by the
aptitude of workers and managers for emergency spurts—much in evidence
in both countries. Thus endowed, they were able in the later years of
the war to equip and re-equip new lines of production in remarkably
short time. Also the scale of their industry was so vast that it
enabled them to establish and to run special factories where
standardised products could be modified in accordance with the changing
requirements of the Services without interfering with the main flow of
production.

Needless to say the quality of American weapons was also proving
fully
equal to the demands of the war. The suitability of American aircraft
was never in question. American fighters, even those of earlier
vintage—the Tomahawk and the Kittyhawk—gave an excellent account of
themselves in the Middle East and were highly

--244--

welcomed at the height of the Libyan battle. Equally
valuable proved to be the Catalina flying-boat, which entered British
service in 1940 and continued to be usefully employed in the Battle of
the Atlantic. And if the number of Flying Fortresses and Liberators in
service with the R.A.F. was very small, it was not for want of asking.
Indeed, so anxious was the Air Ministry to get a large number of
American 'heavies' in time for the great bombing attack on Germany in
1942 and 1943 that the diversion of the promised bombers to American
use after Pearl Harbor was received in the Air Ministry as a heavy blow.

American army weapons were still open to the objection that they
were
different from the British; but they could not be spurned for being
inferior or even for being impervious to British lessons. Though
reluctant to adopt the British army weapons or naval weapons in their
entirety the American designers were prepared to accept proved British
ideas. It was very largely on British advice that the inferior features
of the United States M.3 medium tank, above all its turret, were
dispensed with in favour of a British-inspired design. British ideas,
as embodied with in a tank designed by the Canadian General Staff, also
influenced the development of the American Sherman tank.80
Before long
American Services and designers had accumulated sufficient experience
to forge ahead of this country at several points. In the field of tank
armament the American 75-mm. and 76-mm. dual-purpose tank guns won the
acknowledgement of British tank experts, and so did the miscellaneous
infantry equipment which American industry was turning out by the end
of 1943. The excellence of American transport vehicles had come to be
accepted much earlier and was to form the basis of the entire vehicle
policy of the War Office.

In naval arms quality of American design and production eventually
asserted itself. The Admiralty always rested on the proud assurance of
the great qualities of British naval architecture and naval armament;
and temptations to follow American examples were very few. Yet in the
later phases of the war American naval architects and engineers were
developing designs and methods of construction and were using prime
movers (mainly turbines employing higher temperatures and pressures)
which were well in advance of British practice. Even in the design of
aircraft, where British standards and achievements stood very high
throughout the war, the marriage of American airframes with Rolls-Royce
engines, as in the Mustang fighter, was capable of producing aircraft
of quality second to none.

--245--

the American engine-makers may still have been unable to rival the
Rolls-Royce liquid-cooled engine' and the Rolls-Royce Merlin, produced
in America by Packards, was still the best American-made engine of
this type. But the American designers and makers were now producing
air-cooled engines of great size and power especially suited for
installation in bombers. The coming of the B.29, the Superfortress, in
the closing year of the war marked another and a very remarkable
advance in a branch of aircraft production where British types had
hitherto stood highest.

Thus no argument of general application ever stood in the way of
ever larger requests for American munitions of every kind; and the
requests in the end came to cover a very wide range of stores and
weapons. Now that the 'capital equipment' of the field army was nearly
complete, standard infantry weapons or guns of American type were not
required. But individual articles of proved quality, capable of being
fitted into the armament of British divisions, or air squadrons, or
naval vessels, were requested and allotted, even though some had
subsequently to be modified to suit British ideas. A British gun might
be fitted to the Sherman tank,81
British instruments might be
installed on American aircraft, and the labour expended in adaptations
appeared to be well worth while. The bulk of British requirements,
however, were for weapons outside the conventional range of standard
equipment. The rough-and-ready principle on which the Service
departments and the supply departments now acted was that the United
States would be expected to cover British requirements for certain
classes of weapons for which the requirements matured or greatly
increased in the later stages of the war.

What these requirements were or were going to be was already
becoming clear by the end of 1942. The strategic plans as they emerged
from the Washington conversations in the autumn of 1942 assumed that
nearly 100 percent of the Allied requirements for transport aircraft,
nearly 100 percent of their self-propelled guns and of 40-ton tank
transporters, and a very high proportion of landing craft, light
bombers, tanks and army transport would come from American sources. In
addition, the Allied needs of merchant shipping over and above the
800,000 to a million tons produced in British yards were to be covered
by the United States, and so was a large proportion of the combatant
vessels such as the auxiliary aircraft carriers, which could be made by
modifying or adapting merchant vessels.82

--246--

Supplies
of groups of certain war-stores from the United States and production
in the United Kingdom and Empire September 1939–August 1945

These expectations were to determine the composition of British
requirements for American weapons during the subsequent two or three
years, although the exact quantities and priorities were bound to
change from time to time. Thus a higher proportion of landing craft was
in the end supplied from home resources, and the proportion of American
light bombers delivered or used was smaller than originally planned. On
the other hand, American productive capacity had to be drawn on to an
ever-increasing extent for the making of such new instruments of war as
radar (especially valves), new sights for bombers and remote-control
gear, even though most of those instruments happened to be wholly or
mainly of British design. As the battle in Europe progressed British
forces received large quantities of miscellaneous stores and equipment.
Standard infantry weapons or guns of American type were not supplied in
any considerable quantity, but miscellaneous army equipment, e.g.
transport and some ammunition, came from the United States in larger
quantities than ever before. The relative importance of American
deliveries in the total supplies of the British forces is illustrated
in Table 36.

(5)

The Ministry of Production

(a) THE 'GAP'

The war industry at the summit of its effort made new and exacting
demands on Government machinery. Readjustments in the machinery were
accordingly made. There were changes, mostly small, in the organisation
of the supply departments and there were important innovations at the
centre, i.e. at and around the War Cabinet offices, and among them the
setting up of the office of the Minister of Production now replaced the
somewhat dispersed authority of the coordinating committees. To begin
with, the change may not have been as radical in substance as it
appeared to be in name; but in the end, i.e. by 1944, the powers and
the usefulness of the new office had grown sufficiently to give the
country the essence as well as the form of a coordinating department of
state in charge of war industry.

At a time when the war finally passed out of its passive phase and
the military needs both grew and changed in emphasis, a close and
continuous link between strategy and production was needed, and the new
Ministry supplied it. With industrial mobilisation at its peak

--248--

it was no longer possible to expand industrial effort all
along the line, and expansion at some points had to be matched by
contraction at others. It was therefore very fortunate that the shifts
of resources from one supply department to another and, eventually the
gradual demobilisation of industry could now be done under the aegis of
a 'neutral' and coordinating Ministry of Production. At a time when the
British war effort was rapidly ceasing to be self-sufficient, and an
ever-greater proportion of munitions was coming from the United States,
the negotiations with American authorities were at last in the hands of
a Minister who could speak for the three Services and three supply
departments, and do so with the authority of a member of the War
Cabinet. In addition, the Ministry was able to provide a unified
direction for a number of essential administrative activities which no
single supply department could run alone: allocation of machine tools,
regional organisation, exceptional claims to labour.

Some of the needs the Ministry eventually met had been felt more
or less from the very beginning of rearmament. Above all, the old
'gap', i.e. that between requirements and production, had been noticed
and criticised even before the need for filling it became really
urgent.
Some of the other functions of the Ministry grew up as new
interdepartmental 'gaps' opened. The Ministry's usefulness and
authority were therefore bound to grow more or less gradually,
according as old needs were met and new needs appeared. For the same
reasons the Ministry could not have obtained at the outset the
authority and the position it eventually acquired. At the time of its
creation, in the early months of 1942, the tasks of war production
appeared to be fully shared between the supply departments, and the
crevices between them were filled, or at least papered over, by various
interdepartmental devices. The usefulness of the Ministry of
Production, though for a long time apparent to opinion outside the
Government, had still to be proved to the people who manned the
administrative machine. In the end the proof was provided by event.

At the time when the office of the Minister of Production was
first created, i.e. in February 1942, the shortcomings of the existing
system, though often admitted, did not appear to call for radical
remedies. In the course of two years of war the supply departments and
other ministries concerned with munitions had worked out a rough and
ready routine of cooperation. The routine may have been incomplete and
unsystematic, but it prevented much friction and delay in the lower
ranges of interdepartmental business. On higher levels there was the
Production Executive and its committees, to say nothing of the Defence
Committee (Supply) and the Lord President of the Council;89
at the end
of 1941 the opinion

--249--

generally held in official quarters was that the Production
Executive with its system of committees had not worked badly. During
its brief lifetime it had performed a considerable number of essential
tasks. In so far as it was responsible for the Materials Committee,
whose decisions it ratified, it succeeded in establishing an efficient
system of allocating materials. It tackled the problems of
building-labour and materials and thereby helped to overcome the
difficulties of the building programme, which was then a burning issue.
It also discussed and settled a large number of small interdepartmental
problems. It also invariably succeeded in adjusting claims and policies
of departments, and its decisions were for the most part loyally
accepted by the Ministers.90

At the same time the Production Executive did not and could not
fill important gaps in the conduct of war industry. Being a mere
interdepartmental committee it did no more than provide ministers with
opportunities for negotiation and agreement. It could not act in the
absence of agreement, and it could not enforce its decisions against
the wishes of sovereign ministries. What is even more important was
that it could not provide any lead or take any initiative in production
matters. The matters it discussed were as a rule referred to it by
other departments or by its own committees. Much of its business arose
on reports of the Materials Committee and the Industrial Capacity
Committee. In its two other committees, those of Manpower and Works and
Building, the initiative lay with the respective ministers.
Occasionally
subjects were brought up by Regional Boards, but it would be an
exaggeration to say that the Production Executive exercised a constant
or efficient supervision over the regional organisation. In general,
the Production Executive found few opportunities for watching the
development of war production was a whole. It was officially
responsible for the so-called Series D of the Statistical Digest,
prepared by the Central Statistical Office, in which the main returns
of the munitions industry were summarised. But although the Chairman of
the Production Executive (Mr. Bevin) recognised that the chief use of
production statistics was to compare them with requirements, the full
requirements of the Services and the production programmes based on
them did not as a rule come before the Executive.

These gaps were not of course apparent except when viewed against
an idealised image of a 'streamlined' administration. But so viewed
they frequently were; and not in irresponsible quarter alone. It was
perhaps symptomatic of the changing official attitude that as early as
October 1941 the Admiralty circulated a proposal for the establishment
of a Production General Staff. What was even more symptomatic was the
impression which articles on 'Brakes on

--250--

Production' in The Times
of 2nd and 3rd January 1942 appeared to create. The articles argued
that
'a Production Executive which does not function as such, with Regional
Boards which are almost wholly advisory and … have not authority' was
'a fundamental hindrance to full production' and that there was
imperative need for 'a supreme informed body to plan and control
production to the advantage of the war machine as a whole'.
Counter-arguments were not of course lacking and could be easily
assembled for the Prime Minister's guidance. There was in the first
place the obvious contention that the planning of production in
relation to strategic needs could not be done by any one except the
Minister of Defence and the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet. It
appeared equally obvious that failings in execution of production
programmes could not be tackled by anybody except the supply
ministries.
Nor did local problems and difficulties necessarily call for radical
remedies. The Regional Boards, it was said, were doing all that could
be done. What they failed to do was not due to any lack of authority
but to the difficulties and complexities of the task itself. In general
the imperfections in the work of production were due to human
fallibility and were not to be cured by the setting up of a centralised
production department.

It is difficult to say how far this apologia was accepted in its
entirety even in the government departments. A note by the Ministry of
Labour on the Admiralty memorandum of October admitted that although
the Defence Committee (Supply) to some extent kept under control the
requirements of the Forces, there was no centralised control of what
the Forces were in fact receiving and there was an obvious gap between
the Production Executive and the Defence Committee (Supply). But, on
the whole, the failings of the Production Executive were not thought to
be so great as to jeopardise the war effort. There is therefore little
doubt that had the issue been decided solely in relation to domestic
war production, no major change would have taken place, at any rate not
in 1942.

What finally made the change inevitable and what converted the
Prime Minister to its necessity was not so much the domestic aspect of
the problem as its international implications. Discussions with both
Russia and the United States about allocations of weapons had to be
conducted through a single channel and, if possible, by a minister
capable of representing the interests of British war production as a
whole. From that point of view the new office can be said to have been
germinated in Moscow or somewhere between Moscow and Washington.91
When at the turn of 1941 and 1942 British and American aid to Russia
came up for general review, something in the nature of a joint account
with the United States had to be established. Lord

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Beaverbrook, who represented this country in the Moscow
negotiations, had to speak and act with the same authority as his
American counterpart, Mr. Harriman. The need for a similar
concentration of authority became even great in the next few months
when the two countries took steps to pool their resources. With the
machinery of the Combined Boards in operation92
it was becoming
obvious that an office corresponding to Mr. Nelson's would have to be
set up in this country. The need was not only for creating a
satisfactory symmetry in the official representation of the two
countries, but for seeing that British representatives on the Combined
Boards possessed knowledge and authority sufficient to match that of
their American counterparts.

This, indeed, became the main pretext, if not the sole
justification, for appointing a Minister of Production. In the words of
Lord Beaverbrook setting out his views on the duties of the Minister of
Production:93

The very first duty of the Minister of Production will be to
journey abroad. Not only will it be necessary to go to Washington, but
also to Moscow, because only by such means can decisions be reached on
the questions that will now arise as the result of the Joint Board
sitting in Washington.

(b)
THE PERSONAL OFFICE

Lord Beaverbrook's appointment to the new office was announced on
10th February 1942.94 He did not, however,
remain in the office for
any length of time. His appointment met with criticism from certain
quarters, but probably Lord Beaverbrook's own doubts about the
functions and powers of the new office were more decisive. On 24th
February 1942 he was succeeded by Mr. Oliver Lyttelton,95
who was to
remain the Minister of Production until the end of the war. During the
three and a half years of Mr. Lyttelton's office the Ministry96
enlarged its scope and extended its usefulness into almost every field
of war production. But the timing and the circumstances of its birth
made it certain that, however much it grew, it could never became a
Ministry of Munitions supplanting the separate production departments.
From the very outset all extensions of its authority in that direction
were watched with distrust. In the end it found itself wielding an
authority far larger than that with which it had started, but the
enlargements had taken place piecemeal and in fields which individual
supply departments had not previously appropriated.

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In its first version, as set out in a White Paper of
February 194297 and re-sated by the
Prime Minister in Parliament on
Mr. Lyttelton's appointment,98 the
conception of the Ministry was that
of a largely personal office. There was no intention of establishing a
new government department or of encroaching upon the existing
departments. The coordinating functions which had previously been, so
to speak, put into commission, were now entrusted to a single
minister, but the functions themselves were to remain substantially the
same. Of his various duties, liaison with the United States was the
only one not previously borne by the Production Executive and its
committees. His powers over allocations of raw materials and over
imports in general were that extent more direct than those of the
Production Executive. But in all other respects the position of the
supply departments remained unaltered. They were expected to bear the
full constitutional responsibility for the business of their
departments as heretofore, and were to continue to enjoy the same
sovereign authority within their allotted spheres.

It goes without saying that a definition of duties thus conceived
could
not wholly satisfy the advocates of a Ministry of Production, and did
not at first appear to satisfy the Minister of Production himself. On
the one hand, the Minister showed his wish to act as a coordinator and
to a mere primus inter pares among
other supply ministers, a position he enjoyed by virtue of his status
as a member of the War Cabinet. One of his earliest acts was to set up
the Minister of Production's Council, a periodic meeting of the
permanent heads of the supply ministries presided over by the Minister
of Production. Its first meeting took place on 6th April, and from the
outset it functioned as a deliberating and negotiating body, to which
the Minister invariably committed al major projects of
interdepartmental control and administration.

On the other hand, the Ministry made no secret of his intention of
giving his office greater substance and definition than it appeared to
possess at the outset. The weeks between Mr. Lyttelton's appointment as
the Minister of Production (24th February) and the Prime Minister's
statement in the House (12th March) on the functions of the Minister
were filled with argument and counter-argument about the insufficiency
of the proposed powers. Mr. Lyttelton's own desideratum was for a Ministry
whose coordinating powers would be based not only on authority derived
from his membership of the War

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Cabinet but on his effective power over the use and
disposal of 'common factors'. Some such power he was expected to derive
from his general authority over allocations and import programmes;99
but in the opinion of Mr. Lyttelton and his advisers it was both
illogical and impracticable to entrust him with the supervision of
allocations and import programmes and to lave the Ministry of Supply
and the Ministry of Aircraft Production with the administration of
controls. The alternative (it had previously been adumbrated by Sir
Walter Layton) was that the 'Raw Materials Department and the Machine
Tool Control and possibly the allocation of labour as thrown up by the
Ministry of Labour' should be concentrated in a separate Ministry of
Raw Materials and Industrial Capacity under a Minister responsible to
the Minister of Production.

Very little came of this and other similar proposals. The transfer
of
control over labour was in any case out of the question. The functions
of the Minister as expounded to Parliament by the Prime Minister and
Mr. Lyttelton100 included the duty of
settling in conjunction with the
Minister of Labour the allocation, distribution and efficient use of
labour within the field of war production. But the emphasis was on the
'conjunction', and there was no suggestion that the Minister of
Production would settle interdepartmental labour problems, either by
taking over the Labour Preference Committee or by establishing a
similar body under his own authority. A body of this kind may have
looked right in one or two of the tentative administration charts of
the new office, but nobody 'in the know' could seriously argue that the
control of manpower had been unduly dispersed and needed greater
concentration than the Ministry of Labour had been able to give it. In
any case so weighty was Mr. Bevin's personality and so great was his
authority in the War Cabinet as to place outside the realm of practical
politics any project for taking away from the Ministry of Labour
control of the allocation and distribution of manpower. The proposal
was not in fact seriously pursued and dropped out of discussion almost
at once. No labour allocation department was set up, and nothing was
done to establish direct administrative contacts with the labour
departments of the supply ministries. The Ministry of Labour appointed
a liaison officer, and that office sat on the Labour Preference
Committee with a working brief from the Minister of Production. It will
be seen later101 that

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when in the closing stages of the war the Ministry of
Production came to play an important part in the allocation of marginal
labour, it did so not by virtue of any special authority in labour
matters, but as a result of its growing preoccupation with industrial
priorities.

A more determined attempt was to be made to vest in the Ministry
of Production control over raw materials and machine tools. There were
protracted consultations between the new Minister of Production and the
Ministry of Supply, but in the end the division of functions agreed
between them was to remain largely as originally conceived. The
Minister of Production was to exercise his powers over raw materials at
the highest level, and that presumably meant that he would confine
himself to the broad issues of general policy. He was, of course, to be
in charge of the import programmes of raw materials, and the staff
administering the import programmes was therefore to be transferred to
the Ministry of Production. It was his business to direct negotiations
with the Combined Raw Materials Board and the lend-lease authorities in
Washington, to control the interdepartmental allocations and releases
of
United Kingdom materials, the levels of United Kingdom stocks, the
development of domestic sources and the purchasing policy in the United
Kingdom and the Empire. The administration of all the controls and the
determination of prices was to be in the hands of the Minister of
Supply and no orders to the Controllers were to be given except through
him; but the most essential functions of allocations and priorities
were now within the sphere of authority of the Minister of Production.
For the all-important Materials Committee of the Production
Executive,102 with its highly
experienced staff under Professor Plant,
was now transferred to the Minister of Production's organisation. It
could be expected to function as effectively as hitherto, dealing with
the individual controls and with ministries as it had done when the
Committee was still a semi-0independent body in the War Cabinet offices.

The agreement on machine tools resulted in a somewhat similar
division of responsibility. General control over the procurement and
allocation of machine tools among the supply departments was to be
transferred to the Ministry of Production, but the Ministry of Supply
retained the administration of the Machine Tool Control and with it the
current contact with the machine-tool makers and the detailed
supervision of orders and their execution. In the event, the division
of supervision of orders and their execution. In the event, the
division of responsibility turned out to be less clear-cut than it
appeared on paper. Sir Percy Mills, the Controller of Machine Tools at
the Ministry of Supply, was appointed head of the Machine Tools
Allocation and Utilisation Division at the Ministry of Production, thus
ensuring not only a direct continuity with the Machine Tool Control,
but also

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the continued exercise of his personal authority in all the
important problems of machine tools. The arrangement worked all the
smoother for the fortunate fact that the supply of machine tools was
now rapidly improving. Machine tools were getting more plentiful as the
year 1942 was drawing to its end, and before long machine tools in
general ceased to be an important limitation on war production.103 It
is not therefore altogether surprising that the general tendency in the
Machine Tools Division was to claim greater influence over the
utilisation of tools. This was essentially an 'industrial' function, as
the term came to be understood in the Ministry of Supply; and Sir Percy
Mills himself figured prominently in the subsequent plans to give the
Ministry of Production greater power over the actual production of
munitions.

(c)
THE PRODUCTION STAFF

Greater success was to crown the Minister's endeavours to extend
the
functions of the Ministry over future plans of munitions production
broadly conceived. Before the Ministry of Production was formed the
advocacy of a central production department had frequently carried with
it the notion that war production should be subject to the same 'drill'
as military strategy, i.e. that it should be discussed and coordinated
at the highest level by a body organised and functioning in the same
manner as the committee of the Chiefs of Staff. The idea that there was
a real gap, which only a 'general staff' could fill, made an occasional
appearance in official discussions of the problems, such as in the
memorandum of the Ministry of Labour, to which reference has already
been made.104 Some such idea was
also inherent in the first blue-print
of the Ministry of Production. Sir Walter Layton had for some time
advocated the establishment of a central planning body which could
relate the main strategic decision to the current industrial plans,
i.e. express strategic decisions in terms of material resources, and
perhaps even bring the accurate assessment of industrial problems to
bear upon strategic discussions.

The idea was eventually accepted by the Prime Minister, espoused
by Mr.
Lyttelton and carried into effect by Sir Walter Layton's appointment to
the Ministry of Production. One of the earliest administrative acts of
Mr. Lyttelton was the setting up of a Joint War Production Staff
(J.W.P.S.) made up of the chief advisers to the Ministry of Production
on programmes and planning, the chief technical officers of the
Ministry of Supply and the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the
Controller of the Navy, and representatives of the Chiefs of Staff. It
was expected to advise the Ministry on changes in programmes
necessitated by strategic needs, to keep the Chiefs of

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Staff informed on the state of production, to discuss and
reconcile demands for overseas supplies and to feed with information
the Ministry's representatives on combined Anglo-American bodies.

This part of the project worked out very nearly as planned. The
Joint
War Planning Group, an inner body, directed for the first twelve months
by Sir Walter Layton and staffed by a small group of distinguished and
energetic economists, soon succeeded in focusing official discussion on
the really essential industrial issues. The discussions and findings of
the J.W.P.S. were not, of course, more authoritative than it was in its
power to make them. In spite of its official links it could not command
all the information in the hands of the departments. The urgency of its
reports, the speed with which they had to be prepared and their
all-embracing scope meant that their evidence and their conclusions
were no more than preliminary and were apt to be superseded by more
detailed and better-informed departmental studies. It is also possible
that the ideas emanating from the J.W.P.S. had greater effect within
the Ministry than they had outside. Yet, read after the event, they
present a remarkable record of accurate and timely appreciation. The
very first report of the J.W.P.S., that of 13th April 1942, marked a
real turning-point in the official notions about the relations between
strategy, war industry and manpower in that it brought the prospects of
manpower and production into clear relation with the strategic plan.

For a year or two, however, the relative success of the J.W.P.S.
was
not to be matched by similar successes in other branches of central
planning. The J.W.P.S. and the Joint War Planning Group within it
concerned themselves with future plans and programmes of munitions, but
neither their powers nor their composition suited all the purpose which
a planning authority was expected to serve. In Sir Walter Layton's
proposals for a production general staff a special department in the
Ministry was expected to engage 'in the continuous study of programmes
with a view to their better coordination' as well as with 'the study of
common production problems and difficulties and the direction of the
production departments'. There were thus two functions—a higher and a
lower one; and both implied more than general discussion of the
economic problems and policies underlying the Service programmes. The
planning function in the 'higher' sense of the term would have led the
Ministry to play a major part in the discussion and settlement of
future requirements of munitions as they sprang from successive changes
in strategic plans. The second and the 'lower' function would have made
it necessary for the Minister to control the manner in which production
plans were put into operation by the supply departments.

Of the two activities the second and the humbler function of
planning
presented the greater difficulty in that it promised (or

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threatened) to lead the Minister into detailed supervision
of war industry. Some supervision was implied in the original
definition of the Minister of Production's functions, but it was to be
very general and did not require the assumption of new and special
authority. In the words of the Prime Minister's statement in
Parliament,105 the Minister of
Production 'was to concert and supervise
the activities of the production departments', and this he could be
expected to do by means of his influence on Anglo-American bodies and
by means of the various instruments which he was due to inherit from
the Production Executive.

In the mind of the Prime Minister these instruments were
sufficient to
enable the Minister to supervise and to concert with some effect. They
fell, however, short of what a number of people in and round the
Minister of Production had in mind and of what, to begin with, may even
have been in the mind and of what, to begin with, may even have been in
the mind of Mr. Lyttelton himself. In his first statement to Parliament
he spoke of his responsibility for the utilisation of the real
resources in the most effective manner, and this could easily be
interpreted as the right to control the execution of programmes by war
industries. It was very largely with this intention in view that the
Minister's official advisers propounded a whole succession of
administrative projects designed for the purpose of industrial control.

The first to be proposed and in part to be realised was the
project
for
an Industrial Division. In his statement in Parliament on 24th March106
Mr. Lyttelton appeared to foresee in his office a division staffed with
technical officers from the various production departments. Its
function in the industrial field would, however, be confined to the
fundamental problems of industrial policy which no single production
minister could tackle alone. An example he mentioned was that of
changing factories over from one type of munition to another. This
proposal, coupled with an advisory body of industrialists (Industrial
Panel), was approved by the Minister of Production's Council on 16th
April, and a new branch of the Minister's office to be known as the
Industrial Division came into existence. It acquired at once a
specialised nucleus by taking over from the Ministry of Supply the
entire personnel of the Capacity Register or List 392,107 and from
October 1942 it also functioned as the secretariat of the Location of
Industry Committee. Yet its activities turned out to be somewhat
humble.
It performed several useful interdepartmental tasks; it played an
important part in overcoming the shortages of ball-bearings; it helped
to establish an effective control in the

--258--

distribution of small tools; and it handled numerous
smaller interdepartmental problems. But did not exercise anything in
the nature of a central authority in industrial matters, and was
largely ignored in all subsequent projects to give the Minister of
Production an effective machinery of industrial control.

These projects succeeded each other at frequent intervals, though
they
largely failed to bear fruit. Among them was a scheme, proposed in July
1942, which envisaged the creation of a Production Council with
authority over all the committees taken over the by the Ministry,108
and the appointment of a Chief Adviser on Production. The scheme was,
however, too ambitious and too symmetrical to find sufficient support
with the new department. It would certainly not have survived the
scrutiny of other departments, for that scrutiny proved to be all but
lethal even to the less ambitious proposals of the following
September.109 The latter included a
project for a Joint Industrial
Staff and a Joint Production Committee to take charge of the Minister's
responsibilities in industrial matters. This time the proposals were
framed to meet in advance the objections from other departments. The
Industrial Staff was to be a small and somewhat informal body, a
counterpart of Sir Walter Layton's planning group; the Joint War
Production Committee was to consist almost entirely of representatives
of the supply departments. Above all, the scheme as a whole rested on
the principle that the Minister's responsibilities in the field of
production should be exercised jointly by supply departments and the
Minister of Production and that the new bodies would be not so much
branches of the new Ministry as instruments of interdepartmental
authority. The interdepartmental character of the plan was to be
further emphasised by the setting up of a Committee of the Chief
Executives of the supply departments.

Nevertheless, the proposals still offered sufficient pretext for
associating the Ministry of Production (or worse still, the Permanent
Secretary) with the effective control of current production to provoke
the opposition of the supply departments. By now the opposition was
firmly established. It will be recalled that from the very outset,
indeed while the Industrial Division was being set up, the supply
departments made it clear that it was their own business to see that
production of munitions proceeded according to plan. Above all, the
Ministry of Supply was anxious not to sponsor official bodies capable
of duplicating its own functions. The same fears and objections were to
be

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raised in the autumn of 1942 by the plan for a Joint
Industrial Staff and Joint Production Committee. At an
interdepartmental meeting on 13th November 1942 the representatives of
the supply departments put it on record that in their view the existing
machinery for facilitating the execution of production programmes was
as
fully developed as it need be and suffered from no visible gaps. There
was therefore as it need be and suffered from no visible gaps. There
was therefore no case for a Joint Industrial Staff or for any
interdepartmental machinery proposed by the Ministry of Production. If
the
Ministry felt a gap in the working of its own organisation it could
fill it by action with its department. This admission and the decision
that ad hoc meetings of Chief
Executives might be useful, exhausted all that by now could be
salvaged from the Ministry's plans.

Thus ended the earliest endeavours to provide the Ministry of
Production with a full complement of officers and committees for
effective control over the execution of the munitions programmes. This
does not, however, mean that the Minister remained utterly unprovided
with administrative devices for industrial control. It will be recalled
that in addition to the somewhat inconspicuous Industrial Division
there was an Industrial Panel.110
By the end of the year the Minister
set up, with the agreement of the supply departments, a Progress
Division within his department—a project salvaged from the ill-fated
plans of September to December. At about the same time he also set up
the Munitions Management and Labour Efficiency Committee ('Five Man
Board').

These bodies were, of course, modest in both promise and
achievement. The Industrial Panel was, as its name showed, not an
administrative body acting collectively, but a list of names, mostly
those of industrialists and trade-union leaders capable of undertaking
investigations on behalf of the supply departments. Up to the end of
1942 the members of the Panel carried out twelve inquiries; and its
chairman, Mr. R. Barlow, was very frequently called in to advise the
Minister of Production himself on industrial questions. After 1942,
however, the Panel ceased to be used at all frequently.

Equally uneventful was the career of the Munitions Management and
Labour Efficiency Committee. a decision to set it up was taken in
September 1942 following recommendations of the J.W.P.S. for increasing
production. But what with the delays in obtaining the concurrence of
the supply departments and with the Minister absent abroad the
Committee did not begin operations till mid-December.111 By the end of
March 1943 it had tackled only one large industrial topic—the
production problems of David Brown (Huddersfield). Although the
Ministry of Labour appeared to take a hopeful view of the

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Committee's future tasks, its agenda was destined to remain very
light.

Somewhat more ambitious and more effective were the activities of
the Progress Division. As mentioned above,112
the same meeting of the
permanent head of supply departments on 13th November which refused to
admit that there was a gap between the conception of munitions plans
and their execution, also pointed out that if any such gap appeared to
exist in the Ministry of Production it was the Ministry's own business
to fill it. The hint was taken and early in December the Minister
decided to establish a progressing division within his Ministry. This
was a more authoritative and perhaps a more effective body than any
other so far available within the Ministry for purely industrial tasks,
yet it too fell short of its original purposes. The idea of a
progressing division had in the first place been worked out by Sir
Ernest Lemon, a pre-war Director of Production in the Air Ministry. His
notion of progressing was not far removed from that version of
industrial control which his directorate had before the war tried to
establish in the Air Ministry.113
It was mainly concerned with the
planning and phasing of production in the factories, and involved
direct collaboration with firms in the actual operations in workshops.

The new division was not, and could not be, designed to 'progress'
production in this manner. Sir Ernest Lemon himself realised that the
task required full access to the production plans of the supply
departments and to their first-hand progress reports. It also assumed a
direct and continuous contact with factories and their managers. But as
none of these facilities was to be offered by the supply departments,
the Progress Division had to be designed to act on the strength of the
information available at the Ministry of Production itself, i.e. the
figures of the programme divisions. These could disclose discrepancies
between forecasts and output and thus reveal the lack of balance in
programmes as a whole; but they could do little to help in locating
industrial flows at factory level. The Division as eventually
established had therefore to cut its ambition to suit its information.
The progressing it could undertake was no more than 'notation of
failures in actual deliveries', or broad recommendations of industrial
policy to remedy the failures; and this was certainly not what Sir
Ernest Lemon had in mind. Under Sir Percy Mills as its first head and
Sir Charles Craven as the Minister's Industrial Adviser, the Division
proved to be of considerable use,114
but it never became a major
influence in the conduct of war industry.

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(d)
THE GROWING AUTHORITY

Thus, by the end of the first year of its existence and some six
months after its formal transformation into a ministry,115 the office
of the Minister of Production acquired some machinery for coordinating
the execution programmes. But enough has been said about its different
elements to show that by itself it was incapable of raising the
Ministry to a predominant position in the conduct of war industry. It
was not through machinery expressly designed for the purpose that the
Ministry's competence in the field was destined to grow. The authority
which it had in fact acquired by the end of the war came to by ways
which had been open to it at the very inception of the office: by
virtue of the Minister's position as a member of the War Cabinet, his
command over Anglo-American relations, his power over imports and
allocations, his position at the head of a congérie of coordination
committees and his responsibility for regional organisation.

In all these direction the Ministry gradually asserted its
usefulness and importance. This it did with sufficient tact and caution
to lay the spectre of an imperialist Ministry of Munitions which had
haunted official discussions in 1942. It was also helped by changes in
its senior ranks which did much to banish the earlier suspicions of the
Ministry and its officials.116
For all these reasons the Ministry was
able from mid-1943 until the end of the war to penetrate into fields of
industrial administration which had been heavily barricaded against it
a year or two earlier. Above all, cooperation between the departments
was greatly facilitated by meetings of the executive heads117 under the
chairmanship of the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Production.
Numerous problems, mostly immediate and concrete, were discussed and
settled at these meetings with great advantage.

Thus, through his personal position in the War Cabinet, the
Ministry found himself charged with tackling, at the the Prime
Minister's request, the difficulties of the tank at the turn of 1942
and 1943, the problem of the landing craft, and the timetable of the
offensive weapons. The problems were all, to say the least, 'ticklish',
and in handling them the Minister of Production may therefore have
acted
with caution. But act he did: and thereby he helped to confer upon his
department some of that adjudicating authority which it had undoubtedly

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acquired by the last year of the war—an authority to be appealed
to all in moments of crisis in the field of production.

This authority grew with the increase in the relative importance
of
American supplies and the complexities of the import programmes. Above
all, the industrial stringency of 1943 and 1944, with its recurrent
cuts and adjustments in the munitions programmes and its constant
shifts of priorities, was bound to engage the Minister very heavily.
For not only did the Joint War Production Staff and the Programmes and
Planning Division play a major part in anticipating the need for the
successive cuts and adjustments, but it also fell to the Ministry to
pilot through the supply departments the War Cabinet decisions on cuts
in manpower and to help to reconcile the consequential changes in
programmes.

The growing preoccupation with interdepartmental production
problems at the highest level was to be matched by a growing
involvement with the daily operations of industry through the machinery
of the regional organisation. The story how an effective regional
organisation gradually emerged will be told in greater detail
elsewhere.118 When told, it may
well present its early history as one
of both promise and frustration. The Area Boards (twelve in number) had
been set up in January 1940 by the Ministry of Supply in agreement with
the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Labour. Their main
object was then defined as that of coordinating the activities of the
local representatives of the supply departments, and of helping to find
additional capacity in the areas. The Industrial Capacity Committee
established by the Production Council in July 1940 took over the
supervision of the Area Board, and in August 1940 it tried to
strengthen them by adding to their permanent membership representatives
of employers and trade unions.

For a long time, however, the Area Boards could not be counted
upon to do more than offer facilities for consultation between local
officials. When in April 1941 the Parliamentary Secretary to the
Ministry of Supply, Mr. Harold MacMillan, then at the head of the
Industrial Capacity Committee of the Production Executive, toured the
areas, he found the members of the Boards, especially the unofficial
ones, suffering from a sense of frustration. There was a feeling that
the industrial resources in the areas were not doing what they should
to mobilise them. On Mr. Macmillan's advice the Area Boards were
renamed Regional Boards and somewhat reorganised in the process. Above
all, they were given to understand that their chief duties would be to
help the main contractors and sub-contractors in the task of finding
additional capacity. They were accordingly empowered to set up 'capacity

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clearing centres', somewhat on the lines of the centre which dad
existed in the London and South-Eastern region since August 1940. From
then on the Industrial Capacity Committee and the supply departments
did much to breathe life into the regional organisation. In October
1941 the Boards were given an important part in the redistribution of
skilled labour. They were instructed to set up sub-committees for
labour
supply to assist the Minister of Labour in meeting local demands,
especially those for skilled civilian labour. The sub-committees were
also expected to hear disputed cases of transfer, of grading, dilution,
training and employment of women.

A wide field of activity was thus opened up; it was soon to be
matched by the operations of the machine-tool committees, which had
been established a few months earlier119
to help in the supply and
exchange of cutting tools urgently needed to relieve 'bottlenecks' in
production. Of still greater importance were to prove the 'capacity
clearing centres', of which over thirty-six had been set up by the
spring of 1942.

In this way, when in February 1942 Lord Beaverbrook became
Minister of Production, the regional organisation had grown into an
administrative instrument of some importance, and in the course of the
subsequent two years its usefulness and importance continued to grow.
Inquiry into the work and efficiency of the Boards which Lord
Beaverbrook had decreed in February 1942 showed that some useful work
had been done by all, and much by some; but the report120 also showed
that more still remained to be done in drawing into war production
industrial capacity which was still found to exist in small and
dispersed fragments all over the country.

It was in these three fields—local labour problems, the supply and
utilisation of tools and, above all, the full mobilisation of
industrial capacity—that the regional organisation of the Ministry of
Production pursued its activities. Now and again the plans of the man
in charge of the regional organisation appeared to transgress the
limits of what regional bodies could do or would be allowed to do.
Thus, at one time, the department tried to organise its records and
census-like surveys into something in the nature of a central register
of industrial capacity—a potential instrument of unified control over
the disposition of industrial resources on a national scale. At one
time in 1944 it may even have seemed as if the regional organisation
would fall heir to the hopes which had a year or two previously been
pinned on the various versions of a Central Production Staff. But
thought none of the higher ambitions could be given full play, the
regional bodies had by the end of the war become powerful instruments
of administration. Especially valuable were their services in settling
the detailed

--264--

and highly-complicated priorities of labour, in facilitating the
transfers of capacity and in helping the demobilisation of industry in
the closing year of the war. And through its regional organisation the
Ministry as a whole asserted itself as an indispensable source of
policy and authority.

(e)
THE DESIGNATION OF WORK

It has already been indicated that in the end the Ministry of
Production also acquired important functions in the filling of
industrial demands for labour. The need for any such intervention would
not have been admitted in the first two years of the Ministry's life.
The functioning of the Ministry of Labour as a single department of
state in charge of all manpower problems in itself guaranteed unity of
policy and administration. In so far as interdepartmental committees
had to be created for convenience of negotiation and consultation, they
were closely linked with the Ministry of Labour or else were part of
the War Cabinet machinery and functioned under the aegis of the Lord
President of the Council. The Manpower Committee of the Production
Executive had the Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Labour as
its chairman. It was, of course, mainly concerned with details of
interdepartmental business (deferments, call-ups, etc.), but it was
also called upon to play a part in the preparation of the manpower
survey of July 1941.121 Most of the
discussions relating to this and
subsequent manpower surveys were from the outset in the hands of the
Lord President, his Committee and his immediate official assistants.122
After his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in September 1943,
Sir John Anderson continued to handle these questions as chairman of a
new Manpower Committee. This Committee with its ministerial and
official sections was to remain the principal government organ for the
discussion and the working out of the implications of successive
manpower budgets.

In addition, two other committees, the Labour Coordinating Committee
and the Headquarters Preference Committee, looked after the
administrative problems of labour supply and allocation, but these
bodies also functioned not so much as controlling and arbitrating
agencies as administrative aids to the Ministry of Labour. The Labour
Coordinating Committee came into existence in March 1941 to deal with
those labour problems on which the viewpoints of supply departments
happened to diverge. It was composed of specialists in labour
administration in the supply departments and the Board of Trade, and it
was mainly preoccupied with the practical details of labour
requirements and supply. But its function and usefulness

--265--

reached far beyond the current administration of labour
control. It was sometimes asked to consider in detail the data
assembled for the purpose of the labour budget and often found itself
drawn into the discussion of labour policies. Thus, in April 1942, the
Ministry of Supply and the Admiralty, acting on the request of the
Ministry of Labour, submitted to the Labour Coordinating Committee
their estimates of needs for 1942. After the War Cabinet's decision of
December 1942 on manpower allocations123—and
even before the War
Cabinet reached its final conclusions—the Ministry of Labour and the
supply departments used the Labour Coordinating Committee as a clearing
house for their problems. It was as a rule on this committee that the
representatives of departments discussed the labour aspects of the cuts
in munitions programmes.

To begin with, there was similar continuity in the work of the
other
committee concerned with labour matters, i.e. the Headquarters
Preference Committee. The composition and the functions of this body
were severely practical.124 Its function was to
provide a collective
representation at the headquarters of the Ministry of Labour for the
labour departments of the Ministry of Supply, the Ministry of Aircraft
Production, and the Admiralty; and its man preoccupation was with the
growing practice of labour preferences, about which more will be said
later.

This system of interdepartmental labour committees worked smoothly
and
on the whole successfully, and there appeared to be no ground for
dissatisfaction among government departments with the existing system
of consultations on labour matters. It is therefore not surprising that
very little came from the suggestion of the Minister of Production at
the end of 1942 that an interdepartmental mechanism should be created
to guide adjustments of munitions programmes to labour supply. The
proposal was opposed by the Ministry of Labour and received little
backing in the Labour Coordination Committee. As a compromise, an
interdepartmental group was formed to keep in touch with the changes in
programmes and to report from time to time to the J.W.P.S.; but in
practice it only reported once.

In this way the working of the labour policy and administration
remained un affected by the creation of the Ministry of Production and
by the resulting changes in the structure of War Cabinet committees.
The change which eventually came resulted from the gradual evolution of
the labour preference procedure and from the important part which the
Ministry of Production eventually played in it.

--266--

The system of labour preferences had been growing up during 1941
and was becoming more important as well as more complex as labour
supplies were being exhausted. Grants of special priorities by the
Minister of Labour to laggard elements in production go back to the
turn of 1940 and 1941, the somewhat chaotic period when the War Cabinet
directive on the general priorities of production had begun to be
whittled down by exemptions and additions. But the most important move
towards a régime of labour preferences was probably that of June
1941 when, following a demand for 100,000 heavy unskilled workers, the
Ministry of Labour proposed that the demand should be met by attaching
graded priorities to individual industries. The Labour Coordinating
Committee did not accept the proposal as a whole, but agreed that
priority for supplies of heavy labour should be given to the production
of iron ore, marine engineering products, non-ferrous metals and
cruiser tanks—four industries called upon to meet demands of great
urgency. In September of the same year special labour priorities were
accorded to the radio industry and to the manufacture of chemical
defence equipment, and priorities of second order to a number of other
industries. Experience had by then shown that priorities offered the
best means of meeting the most urgent demands for labour at the most
crucial points of war production. By that time also the Labour
Preference Committee, grown out of the fortnightly meetings of the
representatives of the supply departments, had finally established
itself in charge of the new system.

It was in the next stage that the difficulties and complexities of
the preference system revealed themselves. By then the list of
preferences had become very long, and to that extent indiscriminate.
The list had to be shortened and made more selective, but this in turn
raised problems of procedure and principle. At the beginning of
November 1941 the Defence Committee (Supply) decided that factories
producing aero engines, airscrews, carburettors and fabricated light
alloys should be manned to full capacity. In giving effect to this
decision the Preference Committee granted labour preferences to
individual firms in the respective industries. This meant that
individual firms were singled out from an industry for preferential
treatment, leaving the rest of the industry to fend for itself. The
innovation was helpful in that it enabled a greater discrimination to
be made in the treatment of over-loaded areas and compelled a
continuous
scrutiny of the requirements and operation of the principal munitions
firms. But it also placed upon the Ministry of Labour and the Labour
Preference Committee the power and onus and judging the relative
urgency
of individual weapons and the relative contribution of individual
firms. True, at a special meeting of the Preference Committee on the
5th November 1942, at which the problem of singling out the most urgent
items was discussed, the representatives

--267--

of the departments appeared to think the existing procedure
workable. The difficulties, however, were real and threatened to get
worse. A comb-out of the list was then carried out, but the list thus
shortened soon began to grow once more, and alarm at the number of
current preferences was again evident in the spring of 1943. Nor was
the problem of competence solved. By 1943 even the Ministry of Labour
appeared to feel that the Labour Preference Committee in its attempts
to keep the list down was involving itself in a discussion of subjects
which were clearly beyond its competence.

At this point the Ministry of Production was bound to be drawn in.
It was the proper authority for deciding the relative urgencies of
weapons and stores. It was also responsible for the regional
organisation, and regional bodies had by then come to play an essential
part in the procedure of labour preferences. They sometimes initiated
the proposals for preference; they were invariably asked to explore the
circumstances of individual applications, and it invariably fell to
them to carry out on the spot the decisions involved in a grant of
labour preference.

The issues matured by midsummer 1943. In July of that year the War
Cabinet, having revised the 1943 Manpower Budget, instructed the
Minister of Production to keep supply and demand of munitions labour
under continual review. One of the implied objects of the review was to
ensure that the Ministry of Aircraft Production should not suffer from
a labour deficit in the total budget, if such a deficit turned out to
be inevitable by the end of 1943.This meant conferring on M.A.P. a
special and overriding priority for labour, safe even from prior
'vetting' by the Preference Committee. But once the principle of
super-priority was admitted it was impossible to refuse it to other
branches of munitions production of urgent importance. Super-priority
equal to that of M.A.P. soon had to be given to such items as
ball-bearings, tools and steel tubes which, although needed for the
production of aircraft, were in fact made by contractors of the
Ministry of Supply. But the Ministry of Production was pressing for an
even wider application of the principle to cover the most urgent work
for the Army and the Navy. After a discussion of the whole question at
a meeting of the Joint War Production Staff in the autumn of 1943 the
War Cabinet agreed that it should be the task of the Minister of
Production to 'designate' as being of equal importance with aircraft
those products or services which he considered to be vital to the war
effort. Henceforth meetings under the chairmanship of the Chief
Executive of the Ministry of Production considered and made
recommendations as to labour preference policy. By agreement between
the departments much discretion was given to the Deputy Secretary of
the Ministry of Labour and the Chief Executive of the Ministry of
Production to resolve these questions as operational needs demanded.

--268--

Thus a highly important method of allotting supplies of scarce
labour had come to be worked out. When the overriding preference to
aircraft production was withdrawn at the beginning of 1944 it remained
the business of the Ministry of Production to 'designate' the products
which were sufficiently 'vital' to entitle the industries and firms
making them to a super-preference in the filling of labour vacancies.
The Ministry of Labour was of course closely associated with the
Ministry of Production in controlling the composition of the list of
designations, but it was issued on the Minister of Production's sole
authority, and his department became the main instrument in its
preparation and working.125 In this way the
difficult and highly
complex problems of labour control, at the time when the stringency was
at its highest, came to be matched by an efficient administrative
device; and the Ministry of Production received an important accession
to its function and authority.

(f)
THE 'MIGHT HAVE BEEN'

Thus, in the closing years of the war the growth of the Ministry
of Production completed the administrative structure of war production.
The old and much discussed 'gap' between strategic and industrial plans
was at last filled, and so were the more recent gaps between American
supplies and British production, between central plans and regional
action, between declining equipment and rising demands from the field
of battle, and, finally, between the military and civilian requirements
in the period of reconversion. These gaps might not have been filled
well or equally quickly by the alternative means of interdepartmental
consultation. For, although the habits and the machinery of
coordination had been well developed before the Ministry of Production
came into existence, there was bound to be greater expedition and
efficiency under a prominent member of the War Cabinet served by the
administrative facilities of a full-fledged department of state.

<>The solution, however, was historical, not rational. It
was a
satisfactory resolution of the administrative issues which had arisen
in the course of the war, and was not necessarily an ideal recipe for
administering the production of munitions de novo. The Ministry was called
upon to complete and strengthen the system of departments in charge of
war production; but the particular configuration in 1942—three separate
supply departments catering for three respective fighting Services, but
one of them also in charge of raw materials—was in itself a product of ad hoc decisions and of gradual
evolution. Indeed, it was not the
configuration envisaged in most of the pre-war

--269--

plans or at first intended by the pre-war Governments. It
will be remembered that according to most of the pre-war plans the
Ministry of Supply was to consist of a single department catering for
the three Services and matched by a Ministry of Resources, or at least
by a Ministry of Raw Materials.126
Three independent supply departments
emerged as a result of the Admiralty's refusal to part with the design
and production of ships, followed by a similar refusal from the Air
Ministry to give up responsibility for the supply of aircraft. But for
this double refusal there would have been a single Ministry of Supply,
and the problem of interdepartmental coordination in its 1942 version
might never have arisen.

The separate existence of three supply departments, each narrowed
down
to the needs of one fighting Service, was not, however, the only
characteristic feature of the system. The field in which the supply
departments, taken separately, now operated may have been narrower than
that of the Ministry of Supply of the pre-war blue-prints, but within
their fields they were expected to perform more functions than a single
ministry might have done. For the Ministry of Supply and Ministry of
Aircraft Production were concerned not only with the quantity of
weapons but also with their quality, and administered not only the
munitions industries but also the technical and scientific effort that
went into the design and development of weapons.

The reasons for which this particular combination of functions was
chosen in 1939, when the Ministry of Supply was created, and was
repeated in 1940, when the Ministry of Aircraft Production was formed,
were partly contingent and accidental, and partly prompted by a
rational argument. The contingent factor was the existence within the
Service ministries on the eve of war of branches which in fact combined
control of production with responsibility for development of
weapons—that of Director General of Munitions Production in the War
Office and that of the Air Member for Development and Production in the
Air Ministry. The two departments were the embryos of the future supply
ministries and were bodily taken over when those ministries were formed.

This solution was also backed by an argument. Again and again in
Parliament and in official papers warnings were made against a
'divorce' between design and production. There was the suspicion that
left to themselves the technicians in the Service departments might
design weapons difficult to produce or might insist on modifications
and improvements which would disrupt production. On more than one
occasion before the war British designs were criticised as being too
elaborate or too 'perfect'. This note was repeatedly sounded in
parliamentary debates during the years of rearmament, and now and again
it crept even into the papers emanating from

--270--

government departments themselves. Thus on the eve of the war the
British experts who visited France to inspect French armament noted
with a somewhat envious admiration how successfully the designers of
French weapons adapted them for ease and economy of production. Much
later similar opinions were passed on some German and on all the
Russian equipment. In these implied comparisons no reference was made
to the administration of design in France, Germany or Russia (in all
these countries design was in fact administered by the Service
ministries), but in discussing the situation at home people commonly
assumed that a close administrative link between design and production
would solve the problem. The arrangements with in the Service
departments themselves appeared to lend support to the view.

Between the authority which the supply departments were now given
over design, and their existence as separate ministries there was an
obvious connection. Once it was decided to entrust the design of
weapons to the Ministry of Supply a single Munitions Ministry became
impossible. For a ministry supervising the design, development and
production of weapons for the three Services would have been too large
to be run by the most efficient of ministers or civil servant. It would
probably have in fact functioned as a federation of three largely
independent sub-ministries; and the same problems of coordination which
faced the three supply departments in the war would have had to be
faced within the ministry itself. In short, the true alternative to the
organisation which emerged in the war was not a mammoth ministry of
munitions engulfing the three supply departments, but a supply ministry
conceived purely as a ministry of production, i.e. concerned with
production alone.

This was not the solution adopted in the war, and it was therefore
spared the criticisms it would have drawn upon itself had it been
attempted. What was criticised was the system in operation, and the
criticisms were of course directed at both its principles—the division
of the field between the ministries and the powers of the supply
ministries over design and development. In this study main attention
has
to be given to a discussion of interdepartmental coordination, for this
discussion was most relevant to the history of production. But had
design and development been a major theme of this book, equal attention
would have been paid to the other criticism. It came mostly from
Service circles, and was therefore less vocal than the discussions of
coordination which were largely 'civilian'. It was, however, to be
heard in various places and at different points of time. A Director of
Artillery might be heard regretting his exile in the Ministry of Supply
away from daily contacts with the activities and opinions of the War
Office. The critics of the tanks might deplore the difficulty of
bringing the experiences of tank battles to bear upon

--271--

the business of design. Now and again the representatives of the
Air Ministry might treat some of the shortcomings of wartime production
as penalties for the removal of design of aircraft from the Air
Ministry. And it goes without saying that the Admiralty was able to
blame the Ministry of Aircraft Production 'set-up' for the trials and
tribulations which beset the evolution of naval aircraft.

Some such criticisms were of course inevitable. By decreeing that
design should not be separated from production the Government did not
remove the dangers of an administrative hiatus, but merely transferred
them to another link in the control of actual design. And as long as a
weak link was assumed to exist, criticism was bound to focus on it.

Yet although inevitable, the criticism was not built up into a
fully argued case. Both the relevant evidence and the conclusions drawn
from it remained somewhat uncertain to the very end of the war; indeed
they were less certain at the end of the war than at the beginning. Was
it ever agreed that the naval vessels, designed as they were within the
Admiralty, proved more satisfactory in action or more advanced
technically than contemporaneous aircraft, designed in the Ministry of
Aircraft Production, or than the guns designed in the Ministry of
Supply? Nor was foreign experience much drawn upon. On the occasions
when decisions were not taken by the Führer himself, the design of
German aircraft was administered by the Services; but it was not argued
nor indeed admitted, in this country that the German system resulted in
better aircraft. The American Army and Navy also had a greater
administrative hold over the design of their weapons (including
aircraft) than the British Services had over the design of theirs. But
this fact was not much cited either in the earlier criticisms or in the
later praise of American weapons.

Above all, the width of the gap at home was never properly
measured. How wide in fact was the gap between operation experience and
the control of design? There was, or should have been, none in the
Admiralty. As to the relations between the Air Ministry and the
Ministry of Aircraft Production, various devices were adopted for
bridging the gap between the 'user' and 'supplier' at the topmost
level:127 but even more
important than formal devices were the

--272--

personal contacts between men. Design and development in the
Ministry of Aircraft Production were as a rule controlled by high
serving officers, sharing common experience and outlook with the heads
of the Air Staff and in constant touch with them. More especially, from
1943 the Chief Executive of the Ministry, Sir Wilfred Freeman, just
back from the Office of the Vice-Chief of Air Staff, took special pains
to maintain regular contacts both formal and information with his
former colleagues. In the Ministry of Supply high-level contacts over
matters of design and development were perhaps not so centralised or so
continuous as in the Ministry of Aircraft Production. But there, too,
close high-level contacts over questions of design were available in
the person of Engineer Vice-Admiral Sir Harold Brown, Controller
General of Munitions Production until 1942 and Senior Supply Officer
for the rest of the war period, and in the persons of the several
generals who either headed various branches of the Ministry or
represented the General Staff of the War Office in discussion with the
Ministry.

It was not these links, however, that the critics desired and the
absence of which they deplored. What they had in mind was a daily
contact at lower level, access to common experience, and ease of
informal approach at all times. More than anything else they wished to
throw open government departments and firms' offices to direct
impressions from the field and sky of battle. It is not, however,
certain that direct operational lessons were wholly denied to the men
in industry and in the supply ministries. In the Air Ministry the
business of collecting operational experiences and embodying them in
'operational requirements' was well organised and elaborately
canalised; yet it could not prevent manufacturers (to say nothing of
the technical branches of the Ministry of Aircraft Production) from
cultivating contacts with serving officers and guiding their design
policy accordingly. The success of an important breed of aircraft
turrets has been partly ascribed to informal links of this kind; and
almost every large aircraft firm maintained a similar private
channel—one is tempted to call it a service. In the sadder moments of
tank history both sides, the War Office and the Ministry of Supply,
suspected each other of failing to meet the needs of battle. But in
1942 the Ministry of Supply had its own mission in Libya collecting the
lessons of battle, and both before and after that date direct
reports—and messengers—from Africa were not spurned. In other fields,
especially in the study of gunfire, the lessons were gathered for the

--273--

Ministry of Supply by operational research groups specifically set
up for the purpose.

Thus it is probably true that in matters of design the gap between
the 'user' and the 'supplier' was not quite as wide as was sometimes
pictured. At any rate it was probably not allowed to remain for long at
its widest. Therein lies, of course, both the virtue of British
constitutional methods and also the vice of purely constitutional
judgements. For in Britain, during the war, the formal conventions of
constitutions and symmetry of administrative charts seldom represented
the real methods of government or the real division of functions
between officials. The necessities of war lead to a number of working
arrangements, which largely remedied the division of the field into
three supply departments and later culminated in the Ministry of
Production. The same necessities of war greatly mollified the rigour of
the separation between the men in the fighting Services and the
designers of weapons.

22 This
figure includes some of the requirements under the 1942 bomber
programme. Before September 1941 the requirements ran at a monthly rate
of about 2,500 per month.

23 From
1942, all estimated requirements are first month of year estimates
except for Ministry of Supply (1942) where a later estimate including a
large estimate including a large War Office demand is used.

24 A
large part of the Ministry of Supply requirements for 1942 onwards were
for machine tools for the Army. These were mainly different from those
in demand for munitions production and a very large proportion were
portable low-cost machines.

29 United
States supplies in 1939 were, by tonnage, sixty-two percent of the
total United Kingdom imports of machine tools' in 1940, ninety percent;
in 1941, ninety-five percent; and in 1942–44, ninety-nine percent.
After 1939 Canada supplied the greater part by tonnage, of the
remaining imports of machine tools.

30 Tools,
gauges, etc., made by the users themselves are not included. The
quantity of some tools thus provided was very considerable.

32 Further
details on raw materials import programmes and stocks will be given in
the forthcoming volume in this series on the Control of Raw Materials.
The facts in this chapter are largely based on the corresponding
sections in Mr. Hurstfield's book.

54 The
Prime Minister's directive was issued on 28th November, but it was
preceded by a meeting of ministers on 26th November at which the main
principles of the forthcoming directive were discussed. The figures
were subsequently discussed and modified, and the final conclusions on
cuts were reached at the War Cabinet meeting of 11th December.

56 The
Admiralty had presented a bill for 33,000 additional workers, of whom
forty percent were to be skilled, as a prerequisite for the fulfilment
of the large programme of escort and anti-submarine vessels recently
approved.

57 776,000
for the Services, 174,000 for supply departments, 240,000 for basic
industries.

64 See
p. 207 on the narrowing down in the range of
types of machine tools
needed from abroad.

65 See
E. R. Stettinus, Jr., Lend-Lease,
1944. Chapter VIII: '2,400 aircraft were exported to Britain and to
British forces in Egypt from March to December 1941'.

66 This
represented about sixty-five percent of requirements from new
production.

67 See
R. G. D. Allen, Mutual Aid between the United States and the British
Empire, 1941–1945, Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society, Vol. CIX, Part III, 1946.

68 The
correspondence and the exchange of telegrams between British
representatives in the United States and the War Cabinet Office in
London in the summer of 1940 contain a number of messages representing
this point of view.

73 This
'Balance Sheet' of December 1940 was presented to the President on 5th
January 1941. It set down, firstly, British requirements of munitions
for 1941–42, secondly, estimates of British production, and, thirdly,
the deficiencies that would remain.

74 A
committee of heads of the British Supply Missions in North America set
up in December 1940 under the chairmanship of Mr. Purvis.

75 This
account of the 'Victory Programme' is based on information in the
forthcoming volume in this series on North American Supply,
op. cit.
For the American
side of
the programme see M. S. Watson, Pre-War Plans and
Preparations, in the
series The United States Army in
World War II, sub-series The
War Department (Washington D.C., 1950), pp. 331–55.
For an
American account of the growing Anglo-American intimacy and frequent
consultations in the first half of 1941, see ibid, pp. 371et seq.

76 The
Washington Conference also set up a Combined Shipping Adjustment Board.
The constitution of the new bodies was set out in Cmd. 6332, dated
January 1942.

80 The
Canadian General Staff, on the advice of the United Kingdom tank
representatives, built a development of the United States medium M.3
mounting the 6-pdr. This machine, the Ram, in its turn influenced the
United States project for the M.4 tank which became the Sherman.

82 Total
receipts of warships from the United States by the end of the war
included 38 auxiliary carriers, 99 escort vessels, 132 landing-ships,
2,395 landing-craft, 22 fleet minesweepers, 150 motor minesweepers
(small craft), 113 motor torpedo boats, and 9 submarines.

83 To
30th June, 1944, only and excluding tank chassis for S.P. artillery.

98 The
White Paper defining Lord Beaverbrook's functions was soon withdrawn
(H. of C. Deb., Vol 378, Col. 38, 24th February 1942). The terms of the
document had been subject to a careful scrutiny by Mr. Lyttelton and
his immediate advisers and a revised version formed the basis of the
Prime Minister's statement in the House of Commons on 12th March (H. of
C. Deb., Vol. 378, Col.s 1205–1207). The main principles of the White
Paper were not, however, affected by the revisions. No White Paper was
issued on the appointment of Mr. Lyttelton.

99 In
the original version of his functions a slight clash appeared possible
over the import programmes, for the functions assigned to the Minister
of Production appeared to overlap the duties of the Import Executive.
Eventually the clash was avoided by replacing the Import Executive by
an interdepartmental Shipping Committee, an arrangement that was
completed on 1st May 1942.

109 These
were based on the suggestions of Sir Henry Self who had joined the
Ministry a short time previously. They were discussed in the Ministry
and between the departments throughout the autumn, mostly during Mr.
Oliver Lyttelton's absence in the United States.

116 In
June 1943 a new Permanent Secretary of the Ministry was appointed and
Sir Robert Sinclair became the Chief Executive. Sir Robert Sinclair's
previous functions included the headship of the British Supply Mission
in Washington and before then membership of the Army Council and the
Supply Council and in that capacity liaison with the Ministry of Supply.

117 i.e.
the Controller of the Navy; Controller General of Munitions Production,
Ministry of Supply; Chief Executive, Ministry of Aircraft Production;
Permanent Secretaries, Ministries of Labour, War Transport, Fuel and
Power; Deputy Chief of General Staff, War Office, an on occasion
equivalents from the Admiralty and the Air Ministry.

124 Although
the Labour Coordinating Committee was established several months before
the Preference Committee, it was before long attached to it for reasons
of policy and convenience.

125 Once
a product was designated it was still the responsibility of the
Headquarters Preference Committee to decide which individual firms
manufacturing it needed 'headquarters' preference to assist in filling
their vacancies. A lower degree of preference was accorded by
interdepartmental committees on the regions.

127 For
five months after the formation of the Ministry of Aircraft Production
and the separation from the Air Ministry of the A.M.D.P.'s department,
the regular meetings between representatives of design and development
and of the operational side, which had bee held since early in 1939,
continued as interdepartmental meetings, but the exploratory and
tentative character of the discussions was increasingly emphasised.
From the autumn of 1940 to early in 1941 there were not formal contacts
between the two Ministries. In February 1941 the Joint Production and
Development Committee,under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Tizard was
established. Meetings of this committees were attended by
representatives of the Air Staff, and in this way a link was forged
between requirements on the one hand and design and development on the
other. On the suspension of the committee in June 1941, attempts at
organised contacts were not altogether given up, and in December 1941 a
series of fortnightly meetings between the Air Ministry and Ministry of
Aircraft Production were inaugurated, attended at their own request by
the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Air Ministry, and the Permanent
Secretary of the Ministry of Aircraft Production.

Transcribed and formatted for HTML by David Newton,
HyperWar
Foundation